Opposition Research

see Am rising, bunch are rnc oppo vets, see dapl delve off the record

rhoades on PBS newshour poster boy?

barbara comstock prof'lize/weaponize ginni pal --> SEE DIRTY TRICKS

STEELE DOSSIER

SEE FBI 3 KASH BONGINO ~ JACK SMITH

SEE FOGHORN GOTCHA GRASSLEY

rnc

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an 222

erik Prince, an ally to former President Donald Trump and the former CEO of a security firm previously named Blackwater, reportedly helped raise funding for an effort designed to surveil Democratic, progressive and anti-Trump Republican candidates head of the 2018 midterm elections.

On Tuesday, February 8, The New York Times released a report consisting of documents and interviews that detailed Prince's role in the surveillance effort. Prince reportedly conducted a meeting withBritish spy Richard Seddon as they allegedly worked to dig up incriminating information on opposing politicians across multiple states.

Since Seddon previously served as an unofficial advisor to Trump administration advisors, the report sheds light on the connection between the Trump administration and the spy effort.

The report also reveals Susan Gore, founder of the right-wing organization, Wyoming Liberty Group and heir to the Gore-Tex waterproof brand, had become the main financial supporter of the effort.

Per NY Times:

"Mr. Prince took on the role of celebrity pitchman, according to interviews and documents, raising money for Mr. Seddon’s spying operation, which was aimed at gathering dirt that could discredit politicians and activists in several states. After Mr. Prince and Mr. Seddon met in August 2018 with Susan Gore, a Wyoming heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, Ms. Gore became the project’s main benefactor."

The group reportedly developed a plan to begin their efforts in Gore's home state of Wyoming and eventually expand to more states including Arizona and Colorado.

Former Wyoming lawmaker Marti Halverson also provided the group with a shortlist of specific targets that they'd planned to surveil. Those individuals include: Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R), who is referred to as a RINO; John Cox, who previously served as the director of Wyoming's Department of Workforce Service; and Scott Talbott, the former director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

Read the full report at the Times.

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GAI says nonpart res but actually OPPO shop

https://www.npr.org/**2019/10**/09/768556474/how-a-political-hit-job-backfired-and-led-to-trumps-impeachment-peril

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The nation's attention is riveted on the drama unfolding in Washington, where House investigators are assembling evidence for their impeachment inquiry, and President Trump is refusing to cooperate. Our guest, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green, says that, ironically, Trump's impeachment peril is the unintended result of an effort to help him.

Last spring, a book came out called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." Its author was Peter Schweizer, the head of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank founded by Schweizer and Steve Bannon. The book includes information about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden and his activities in Ukraine when his father was the vice president.

The book raises questions about possible ethical violations and corruption related to Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine. The book received a lot of attention on Fox News, where it came to the attention of President Trump and led Trump to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to pressure the new government there to investigate the claims in Schweizer's book.

Joshua Green notes in a new article how this echoes the playbook that Schweizer and Bannon successfully used with their 2015 book "Clinton Cash," which raised questions about the propriety of Hillary Clinton's financial dealings and those of the Clinton Foundation. It led to investigations by the mainstream media. Joshua Green writes about politics for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain." He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Joshua Green, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You write that the allegations of corruption involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine were first aired in a book published last year by something called the Government Accountability Institute. What is the Government Accountability Institute?

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, the Government Accountability Institute is registered as a nonpartisan research organization. It was founded in 2012 by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, and Peter Schweizer, who, I believe, is now the president and still works there. And it bills itself as an investigatory outfit that investigates money and politics, corruption and that sort of thing.

DAVIES: Right. Who funds it?

GREEN: Well, we don't know all the funders, but one of its chief funders is Rebekah Mercer, who is part of the Mercer family, headed by Robert Mercer, the former co-chair of Renaissance Technologies, the big hedge fund. The Mercer family was and still is a major right-wing donor to various different causes, big Trump supporters, and a family that has come into the spotlight since Trump's election - also involved in Cambridge Analytica and some of the outfits that became famous and even notorious after the 2016 election.

DAVIES: The funding certainly comes from partisan sources. You know, the co-founder was Steve Bannon. What's interesting, as you write, is that the work - the research that it produced and the books that it produced weren't intended particularly to reach the conservative media or core Republican voters. What was the purpose?

GREEN: Well, the purpose of GAI originally was to, you know, investigate politicians. But given the conservative band of people like Bannon and Schweizer and their funders, the focus often tended to be Democrats. And in my book, I write about howSchweizer and Bannon resolved to go after Hillary Clinton a couple of years before the 2016 election, knowing that she was likely to emerge as the Democratic nominee.

So through GAI and its investigators, its forensic data scientists, you know, they pored over public records, corporate filings, dark Web scrapings to compile, you know, a damning book about Bill and Hillary Clinton in their work through their nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, that was published about a month before Hillary launched her presidential campaign. And that book, "Clinton Cash," became an instant New York Times [PARTNERSHIP?!] bestseller and really tarnished Hillary Clinton's image just as she was entering the presidential fray.

DAVIES: And the interesting thing is that, you know, Bannon was not interested in just generating material for the conservative media. It was important that mainstream media draw on this research and, you know, give it their imprimatur tour too.

GREEN: That's exactly right. You know, Bannon's critique of how Republicans deal with the media goes back to the 1990s and Bill Clinton's impeachment, when he thought that Republicans really just wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber and they chased wild rumors and conspiracy theories and really put off ordinary voters. The media didn't listen to them. Voters didn't listen to them. OPPO RESEARCH

So with "Clinton Cash," he resolved to compile factual information that he wanted the mainstream media to pick up and amplify. And so he explicitly was not looking to reach a conservative audience, which is already going to be predisposed to dislike the Clintons, and was aiming to affect the votes in the views of independents and Democrats and the type of people that Hillary Clinton was counting on.It was important to Bannon that GAI's work be picked up and taken seriously by mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News.

DAVIES: And did those mainstream media organizations publish stories based on the research?

GREEN: Yeah, they did. I mean, famously, there was a New York Times story based on Schweizer's reporting. And it revealed this in the story, looking at a Clinton Foundation deal in a Russian-backed company called Uranium One that really took off and, I think, poisoned the public views of Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. And, as Bannon intended, a whiff of corruption attached itself to Hillary Clinton. Of course, that expanded as the media focused on her missing emails and Republicans pushed these ideas. But the book really succeeded in what Bannon had set out to do. And that was to raise doubts about the ethics and morals and fitness for the presidency of Hillary Clinton.

DAVIES: Right. And we should just note that there is nothing at all unusual about credible reporters getting tips and leads and information from partisan sources. They have to, of course, independently verify the information and assess its credibility. Were the books that the Government Accountability Institute writes generally accurate?

GREEN: Well, they were based on facts. And what these investigators did was go out and turn out examples of foreign donors that hadn't been disclosed and examples of behavior by former President Bill Clinton that seemed to be conducted on behalf of donors to the Clinton Foundation.You know, Schweizer's style is not to fabricate or allege illegality. Instead, he uses his reporting to lay out a suggestive timeline that leads readers to a conclusion that, hey, something is dirty here. This reeks of influence peddling. Something is not right. And it raises doubts about the subjects.

DAVIES: So the new book from Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute is called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." And it identified Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as a target for some of the material. What did it find about Joe and Hunter Biden?

GREEN: Well, what it found was that Hunter Biden, the vice president's son, had become a highly paid director at a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma, a position that he didn't have any obvious qualifications for. But he did have a very famous last name, and the owner of the company was interested, I think, in building credibility. Schweizer also took a look at a private equity fund that Hunter Biden became involved in that drew a lot of money from Chinese investors at the same time that Hunter was flying to China on Air Force Two with his father, the vice president.

So in Schweizer's reporting, you know, this is made to look very fishy and possibly illegal and raise doubts about the ethics of Joe Biden and whether or not, you know, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination really belongs in that position or, you know, is in some way corrupt because of his son's business dealings.

DAVIES: No direct evidence that Joe Biden did anything to assist his son in either of those ventures, right? But there's an association.

GREEN: No. No, there isn't. And Bloomberg News, my employer, has done a lot of reporting and has turned up no wrongdoing.Other outlets have taken a look. I mean, what is going on and what Schweizer is good at finding are situations like this where, you know, I think any objective reader would come to the conclusion that, you know, but for Hunter's last name, he would not be in this position. You and I would not be offered a $50,000 a month board seat at a Ukrainian gas company because our father isn't vice president.

So it's the sort of - it's what, you know, Schweizer calls corruption by proxy. There's nothing explicitly illegal, but it's sort of morally corrupt and an indictment of our system in a way that populist Republicans and Democrats like to criticize.

DAVIES: The Clinton book got a ton of mainstream media attention and had an impact on the Clintons themselves. This book, did it get a lot of mainstream attention? Did it hurt harm the Bidens?

GREEN: You know, it really didn't. It came out in 2018, and it kind of came and went. It - you know, it didn't attach itself to Biden. It didn't become - it didn't drive the political news cycle in the way that "Clinton Cash" drove the 2015-2016 presidential news cycle. It got a decent amount of attention in conservative media, but it never really broke out into the mainstream.

You know, and I speculated in my Businessweek piece, a couple of reasons for this - one, Joe Biden wasn't yet a candidate, and so there wasn't that kind of urgency to look into his past. There might have been had the book come out later on. It also didn't focus only on the Biden's; it focused on John Kerry, Barack Obama, the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.So I think that influenced how it was received. And of course, unlike "Clinton Cash," it wasn't focused on an actual Democratic presidential candidate; it was mainly focused on his son. And so there - it was sort of one degree removed from the primary actors.

I think all these things together help explain why the book didn't really break out until, that is, Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, became infatuated with it, started trying to investigate these things themselves and now has kicked off what has become an entire impeachment proceeding and put the book and the Bidens and Schweizer himself very much in the center of the 2020 presidential news cycle.

DAVIES: So when this book was launched with these stories, what were the ambitions of Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute?

GREEN: Well, I think the ambition was a reprise of what they'd seen with "Clinton Cash," that the mainstream media would look into this stuff and amplify it in the way that they had with the Clinton charges. You know, Steve Bannon, who kind of pioneered this model, has a phrase he likes to use - anchor left, pivot right. And what that means is you want to anchor this reporting on the left and the mainstream media - what Bannon considers the left - get them writing about it and then use the right-wing media to amplify what it is the mainstream media is saying and to kind of dominate the entire mediasphere.

So I think Schweizer and GAI were hoping that "Secret Empires," the Biden reporting, would be anchored in the mainstream media, and the whole process would repeat itself, but that never really happened with the second book.

DAVIES: So what did happen? Why do we know about it now?

GREEN: Well, we know about it now - it got a decent amount of attention in the right-wing media, onFox News, in the New York Post.And of course, some of - you know, one of the most loyal consumers of right-wing media is the president, Donald Trump, who according to reporting watches hours and hours of Fox News every day. So he was exposed to this reporting, exposed to the charges and the insinuations that Schweizer made. He's tweeted about the book. He's tweeted about Schweizer.

And, you know, based on everything we've heard from the whistleblower report, from the White House call transcript that was released at the end of September, Trump and Giuliani took it upon themselves to pick up the phone and try and advance Schweizer's reporting into the Bidens. I mean, essentially, calling the president of Ukraine and saying, hey,I know about this Biden stuff. I want you to look into this. I want you to investigate my political opponent. And, you know, if you don't, we're going to withhold this military aid - setting off all the alarm bells that have now led to the impeachment inquiry.

DAVIES: So it really was the president and Giuliani that took this and ran with it.

GREEN: It really was. I mean, the remarkable thing - a lot of people watch Fox News, watch right-wing media, get upset about the Clintons and the Bidens, but only one of them had the power to pick up the telephone, call the president of the Ukraine and put pressure on him to investigate the Bidens in hopes that they could turn up more damning information about Joe and Hunter Biden, knowing that Joe Biden was very likely to be his Democratic opponent in 2020.

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green about the origins of the story about Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine, which drew interest from President Trump and has now led to an impeachment inquiry. Green is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."

So President Trump has said that Joe Biden, when he was vice president - I guess in 2016 - sought to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired, who was, at that time, investigating the company associated with Hunter Biden, his son - in effect, kind of scotching an investigation into his son by getting the prosecutor fired. What's the truth of this?

GREEN: Well, it is true what Trump says, but it is wildly misleading. Vice President Biden played a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in the Ukraine. But Biden, the Obama administration, Republicans in the Senate, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union were all putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to root out corruption and, particularly, to fire the chief prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, who was not - who was essentially beholden to the oligarchs, was not doing the kind of corruption investigations they wanted.

So Biden threatened to withhold up to a billion dollars in aid from Ukraine if Shokin wasn't fired because he was so deeply corrupt. So Biden and the Obama administration were putting pressure on the Ukraine government to do more investigating of corruption not less, as Trump and his allies are insinuating.

And it's also - I mean, just to be clear, they weren't in - Ukrainian prosecutors were never investigating Hunter Biden. They were investigating an oligarch who owned - who is the co-founder of Burisma, the gas company, on whose board Hunter Biden served.

DAVIES: Right. And is it clear whether, at the time that he was fired,this prosecutor, Victor Shokin, was actually investigating the company?

GREEN: You know, it isn't clear.There have been conflicting reports on this. There does seem to have been an investigation into Burisma. But, you know, they paid a fine. That went away. At no point was Hunter Biden ever implicated in any kind of corruption. And part of what, I think, Trump and Giuliani were trying to do was to reopen this investigation and steer it toward Hunter Biden in hopes that they could find or maybe create damaging material around the Bidens.

DAVIES: There is a new chief prosecutor in Ukraine and was quoted as saying that he had opened an audit of a bunch of old investigations, including one into Burisma Holdings, the company that Hunter Biden was associated with. What does this portend?

GREEN: Well, it's not clear. I mean, one of the things, I think, a lot of people don't understand about the whole Ukraine situation is that Hunter Biden was never investigated by Ukrainian prosecutors. What happened was that they were investigating an oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky, who co-founded Burisma.And so reopening investigations would be investigations into Burisma Holdings. But they - from what we know, that wouldn't affect or have anything specifically to do with Hunter Biden or his situation there.

One of the things that Trump and Giuliani are pushing for in these text messages and these - in these meetings and phone calls is for Ukrainian prosecutors to go further and specifically investigate the Bidens in hope that they can turn up dirt that can be used in the 2020 presidential campaign.

And as far as we know, there's no basis for investigating anything. There is no evidence that I'm aware of or that anybody has reported that would suggest that there was wrongdoing there.And Schweizer himself, in fact, in the New York Times today, has an op-ed saying that, you know, what transpired actually wasn't illegal under U.S. law. It was unseemly. It might have been unethical - the idea of putting a politician's son on a board as a way of maybe trying to influence the political process - but there was nothing illegal here. And that's very much Schweizer's style is not to allege illegality but to insinuate that there is something corrupt going on there.

And, I think, part of the way that this entire story went sideways and went crashing into this impeachment inquiry is that Trump is very much susceptible to the insinuation that there is something, you know, perfidious going on here and took it upon himself to, you know, push and amplify and even threaten people in hopes of advancing the story.

DAVIES: You mentioned that Peter Schweizer, the author of this book that was funded by the Government Accountability Institute, has an op-ed in The Times. He's arguing that there's a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for an American company operating in a foreign country to engage in, you know, bribery or nepotism to secure favor from governments in which they operate but that there's a big hole in the law in that there's nothing to prevent a foreign government from hiring the family of U.S. officials or creating relationships in order to, you know, create an appearance which helps their business. Does he have a point?

GREEN: I think he's got a perfectly good point. And that's exactly what seems to be going on with Hunter Biden. He had no traditional, professional qualification for the job that he held with Burisma, you know, and that in itself doesn't seem right. I think that is what Schweizer is pointing to.

Now, Trump and Republicans have taken it a lot further, twisting a lot of the facts about what was investigated, what the Obama administration and Biden were pressuring the Ukrainian government to do in 2016. But the basic fact that Hunter Biden was on this board and was probably there for political reasons, because there weren't really any other good reasons for him to be on the board - what Scheizer has pointed out here and what he says in his New York Times op-ed is that what Hunter Biden did was perfectly legal, but that, in itself, is a problem.

GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek. After a break, he'll talk with Dave Davies about how the controversy is affecting the Biden campaign and how Trump and his allies are fighting back with counter narratives that paint the president as the victim of Democratic attacks.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green. In a recent column, Green argues that President Trump's impeachment worries are actually the unintended result of an effort to help him. He says Trump picked up on research about Joe Biden developed by a conservative think tank and included in a book last year.

The material was intended to harm Biden's presidential campaign. But when Trump saw the story on conservative media and began urging Ukraine to investigate Biden, he created far bigger problems for himself. Trump is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry into whether he abused the authority of his office. When we left off, Green was talking about an op-ed published in The New York Times by Peter Schweizer, the author of the book with the allegations against Biden.

DAVIES: Are you surprised that The New York Times would publish an op-ed by Peter Schweizer, you know, who got funding from, you know, the Mercers and have a very strong political point of view?

GREEN: Yeah. You know, a little bit, given the controversy it kicked up in 2016 when Schweizer's reporting appeared on the front page - in other words, in the news pages. This piece today is in the opinion section, which I think is a little bit more appropriate for the author and the subject and the claims that he's making.

DAVIES: Right. And just going back to 2016, my understanding is that, you know, the author of the Times' reporting on the Clinton Foundations and the Uranium One story is reporting that they stand by, that they independently investigated all of this and found it credible and newsworthy. Do you disagree?

GREEN: No. I don't disagree with that at all. I mean, part of what made the GAI project so effective is that they didn't do what some conservative authors do, which is to, you know, fabricate or publish rumors. I mean, they're - all of this is based in fact. They certainly put their own spin on those facts. They insinuated that there was maybe more going on than was actually going on. But they really did turn up evidence of unreported donations, of relationships that just didn't seem right that, you know, any legitimate investigative reporter, were he or she to come across this information, would want to look into further. And that's exactly what happened.

So the fact that there is a grain of truth in a lot of what is written is one of the things that makes it so effective and that Bannon and Schweizer understood from the outset would get the mainstream media to pay attention and amplify these charges. I think what happened in 2016 that upsets liberals so much is that, you know, as this stuff was being published in the mainstream media, it was also being amplified and distorted in the right-wing media. And that was having a real effect on Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.

Her reputation was unquestionably tarnished. She was dogged by these charges and allegations. You add in the amplifying voice of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate calling her crooked Hillary and corrupt and I don't think there's any question - but that - it affected voters' views of her in a way that ultimately proved disastrous for Clinton's own candidacy and for Democrats.

DAVIES: One of the things that I think adds to the political potency is that the facts of a lot of these stories are so complicated, that it's really hard for an average reader to sort out what it all means. Was there subsequent reporting on the Uranium One story which cast the Clintons' actions in a different light?

GREEN: Nothing knocked it down. You know, the subsequent reporting - I mean, I think what a lot of Democrats objected to was the fact that this, frankly, partisan outfit and author and right-wing money had produced this information that had made its way onto the front page of The New York Times. And I spoke to the liberal activist David Brock at the time about Schweizer and Bannon. And he shook his head. And he Said, you know, looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus - meaning, you know, the intention all along from these guys was to poison the public image of Hillary Clinton. And by getting these charges onto the front pages of The New York Times, they essentially accomplished that mission. I think everything that happened subsequently with Trump's attacks and Clinton's loss in the 2016 election back that up. And this time around, with Joe and Hunter Biden, they were looking to do the same thing.

DAVIES: In the op-ed, the Times doesn't mention Peter Schweizer's association with the Government Accountability Institute or its funders, you know, the Mercers.What do you think of that?

GREEN: You know, if I were running the op-ed page, I think that's something I would've disclosed based on, you know, his background, the political lineage and what we saw in the 2016 presidential cycle.

DAVIES: So is all of this affecting the Biden campaign?

GREEN: You know, it's not clear that it is. I mean, Biden had been on a bit of a downward trajectory before Trump and the Ukraine charges really came into the news cycle. But, you know, he is - he's starting to slip now. I mean, in the latest averages of polls, Elizabeth Warren has nudged ahead of him. So, you know, it's not clear that this is a deadly development for Joe Biden's candidacy, but it certainly isn't helping.

DAVIES: Since the whistleblower complaint emerged, there's been a lot of information and text and the summary of the phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, which has led to this impeachment inquiry, which is clearly picking up steam. I mean, we're going to see, you know, testimony from other players in this including the former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. The Trump administration says it is not going to cooperate with this because, you know, it's a witch hunt. Where do you see this going?

GREEN: Well, you know, the irony here is that Trump, by involving himself, you know, essentially made this entire project blow up in his face and committed actions that, at the very least, have launched an impeachment inquiry and I think are very likely to lead to his impeachment in the House whether or not the Senate ultimately chooses to remove him.

But what the whistleblower report showed, what the subsequent text messages that have now been revealed between the U.S. ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, and Bill Taylor, a top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that show that the U.S. apparently was withholding military aid to help a political campaign, as Taylor put it in his text. That is the quid pro quo that Democrats are alleging. And I think if there is a trial in the House, that's what it's likely to show. And the evidence we've seen so far certainly supports that.

So I think, from an impeachment standpoint, Trump is in real trouble. Whether or not he's ultimately removed from office, we'll see. I'm skeptical. But certainly this isn't the outcome that Schweizer and GAI and I think Trump and Giuliani expected to happen when they started making noise about this over the summer.

DAVIES: Right. Well, the president's defenders are aggressively promoting other narratives. I mean, Giuliani, a couple of weeks ago, was on the ABC weekend show waiving an affidavit from Viktor Shokin, you know, the prosecutor that was fired in 2016, in which alleges that, in fact, he was investigating the company Hunter Biden's - was associated with. There are certainly reasons to doubt his credibility in the eyes of a lot of people. And then, you know, last week, Senator Ron Johnson had a heated exchange with Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press" in which he was arguing that there's all this credible evidence that people in the Ukraine were trying to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton in 2016. [RUSSIAN DISINFO] It's a very aggressive strategy to - you know, bringing up other stuff. What do you think the effect will be?

GREEN: Well, I think the intention on the part of Republicans is to muddy the waters and to turn the charges of corruption against Trump that we've seen laid out in the whistleblower report and the text messages - turn them back against the Democrats.

What is troubling to a lot of people is that a lot of these charges are based on discredited conspiracy theories. What Ron Johnson was talking about was a conspiracy theory that Trump and Giuliani have propagated that it wasn't Russia that hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in the 2016 election but Ukraine.That's something that's been knocked down by every intelligence official, U.S. and otherwise, who's looked into this. And yet, this is what's being propagated by Trump.

And I think a lot of Republican politicians, fearful of Trump's wrath and eager to toe the partisan line, have found themselves forced or obligated to repeat these wild charges in a way that bears no relationship to reality but is nonetheless, I think, muddying the waters and shaping public opinion in a way that is intended to mitigate the damage of the charges against Trump.

DAVIES: Is Steve Bannon playing a role in stoking any of these allegations?

GREEN: You know, he really isn't anymore. I mean, Bannon had a very public falling-out with Donald Trump in 2017, where Trump sort of publicly humiliated him and excommunicated him from the Republican Party. He lost his position as the head of Breitbart News, was essentially sent out into the wilderness.

I mean, Bannon is still around on the scene. He is focused more on China these days and trying to, I think, strengthen Trump's resolve to conduct the trade war. Trump did tweet favorably about him a couple of months ago. But there isn't a close relationship there in the way that there was during the presidential campaign.

DAVIES: Yeah. I asked because you wrote a book about Steve Bannon and talked to him a lot. He was also going around Europe trying to kind of build a, you know, nationalist, populist movement. How did that go?

GREEN: Well, it basically failed. I mean, the nationalist movements in Europe weren't really interested in an American political strategist coming in and telling them what to do. They didn't perform nearly as well in the May European parliamentary elections as Bannon and some of the nationalist contingent were hoping for.

And so he's focused mainly these days on kind of beating the war drums against China, going out and publicly defending Trump's aggression against China when it comes to tariffs and the trade war and that sort of thing, and seeking to remain relevant in that way. But so far, there has been no reproach with Trump and the White House, or the Mercer family, for that matter. And so he's off on his own.

DAVIES: You know, looking at the strategy of the Government Accountability Institute with this book, you know, the idea was to kind of repeat the playbook that worked with the Clinton candidacy in 2016, where you develop information, it becomes adopted by the mainstream media and becomes a scandal. And in this case, it seems like another - kind of a different weird thing happened, which is that it turned into a scandal for the president himself when he pursued a theory and then engaged in conduct which has resulted in this impeachment inquiry.

At the same time, Peter Schweizer, the author of the book funded by the Government Accountability Institute, is being quoted. I mean, the story is out there. I wonder how they view this - how it's all worked out.

GREEN:Well, the irony here is that the target was supposed to be the Bidens, not the president. And by the president becoming involved, you know, the original plan has kind of blown up. What may wind up happening - as you say, you know, Biden and these charges are very much in the news. That was part of the intention, even if the negative attention toward Trump wasn't part of the plan. What we could see end up happening is a kind of a murder-suicide where Trump really does take out his strongest Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, only, he winds up, in the process, getting himself impeached.

DAVIES: Well, Joshua Green, thanks so much for speaking with us again.

GREEN: Thank you. It's always a pleasure.

GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."

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oppo research?!

U.S. Senate voted along party lines Thursday night to make Tracy Stone-Manning the first confirmed director of the Bureau of Land Management since the Obama administration.

The vote, 50-45, ended a contentious confirmation process for Stone-Manning, a senior adviser for conservation policy at the National Wildlife Federation who served as chief of staff to former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat.

It also represented a victory for her biggest supporter, U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat for whom Stone-Manning once worked as an aide. Senate Republicans fiercely opposed her nomination, most vocally because of her ties to a 1989 plot to drive spikes into hundreds of trees.

Republicans maintained their resistance up until the last moments before the vote Thursday evening, with a parade of Western senators coming to the floor to register their opposition.

In a tense exchange, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee ranking Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming called her “completely unfit for the job.”

“Ms. Stone-Manning lied to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee about her involvement as an eco-terrorist and in the eco-terrorism,” Barrasso said, adding that Senate Democrats would be “held personally responsible” for voting to confirm her.

Tester told Barrasso he accepted that challenge.

“You’re damn right. Hold me accountable for Tracy Stone-Manning,” he said. “I’ve worked with her. I know what she does. I know she can get the job done. She can bring people together.”

Tester also seemed to lay blame for the Republican campaign against Stone-Manning on his state’s other senator,Republican Steve Daines, saying it was retribution for Stone-Manning’s support of Bullock’s unsuccessful run for Daines’ Senate seat last year.

“I’m going to point out one thing that Tracy Stone-Manning did that was wrong: She actually agreed to be Gov. Bullock’s chief of staff,” Tester said.

“If somebody wants to go in and do an investigation and find out what’s happened over the last three years, with the governor running against a sitting senator in this body and she being the governor’s chief of staff, you will find out why people stand up and make stuff up about Tracy Stone-Manning.”

In a statement after the vote, Stone-Manning said: “I am grateful for the Senate’s vote of confidence today and look forward to bringing decades of experience — working on the ground and across the aisle— to carry out the critical mission of the Bureau of Land Management. Our public lands are one of America’s finest ideas, and I am ready to get to work alongside a remarkable team to ensure future generations benefit from them like we have.”

Rebuilding the BLM

Stone-Manning will be tasked with rebuilding an agency at the center of President Joe Biden’s climate and energy agenda. The BLM oversees nearly 250 million acres of public lands, including roughly 50 million acres in Nevada, and manages the federal oil and gas leasing program.

Biden temporarily paused that program and ordered a review of federal policy when he took office. A federal judge this summer ordered the program be renewed. The Interior Department, of which the BLM is a part, has said it is working to restart leases.

Stone-Manning will oversee the agency’s move back to Washington from Grand Junction, Colo. The move reverses a controversial decision during former President Donald Trump’s administration to relocate the agency to the West, where nearly all BLM lands are.

Opponents said the decision hollowed out the agency influence in the nation’s capital and drove out experienced workers. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced this month the headquarters would be relocated back to Washington.

The agency has lacked a Senate-confirmed leader since Neil Kornze stepped down at the end of President Barack Obama’s term in January 2017. Under Trump, anti-public lands attorney William Perry Pendley ran day-to-day operations as the deputy director for policy and programs, but was never confirmed as the director.

The lack of a Senate-confirmed director led to uncertainty in the agency, including a Montana federal judge invalidating some decisions the BLM made during Pendley’s time in office.

Tree-spiking incident

Days after Stone-Manning’sconfirmation hearing earlier this year at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where Republicans were already skeptical of her political work and opposition to fossil fuel development, the conservative site Daily Callerpublished a report detailing Stone-Manning’s involvement with a 1989 tree-spiking plot while she was a graduate student at the University of Montana.

Though the episode was already public, it was not well known in Washington and the article intensified Republican opposition.

Court records and Stone-Manning’s own account show she mailed a letter in 1989 to the U.S. Forest Service threatening that loggers who attempted to cut down a portion of Clearwater National Forest could be hurt by spikes driven into them in an attempt to sabotage a sale—a federal crime.

She has said, including at her confirmation hearing for a state post in 2013, that the scheme’s organizers approached her and asked her to mail the letter. She said the ringleaders intimidated her and that she wished to warn loggers who may have been in harm’s way. She later testified against two men who were convicted for the tree-spiking.

Other accounts, including froma Forest Service investigator, said she was more involved in planning than she’d indicated. Republican senators also took issue with her response on a pre-hearing questionnaire that she had never been the target of a criminal investigation.

On the Senate floor on Thursday night,Idaho Republican Jim Risch accused Stone-Manning of perjury in a Senate floor speech and said she would have no credibility when she appears before the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the BLM, as director.

But it was Tester who had the last word before the vote.

“Now, we’re going to take a good woman, a good woman who the state of Montana knows well, who, in fact, was vetted in the state of Montana and they said all these accusations have no merit,” he said. “And we’re going to run her through the ringer here. Character assassination like I’ve never seen before.”

The aggressive Republican campaign against Stone-Manning belied the reputation she’d built as a consensus builder on conservation issues. She won bipartisan backing from the Republican-led Montana Senate in a 2013 vote to become the state’s director of environmental quality.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/the-tale-of-a-right-wing-scam-artists-downward-trajectory

no lnx vod?

tale of a right-wing scam artist’s downward trajectory

Written by Roger Sollenberger / Salon June 5, 2020

I didn’t want to report this in the first person, but here we are.

Last week I received a press release from right-wing internet troll Jacob Wohl and his decades-older partner, conspiracy theorist Jack Burkman, announcing a stunt so outlandish it did not come close to the level of publication. I could track down only one other journalist who received the press release, and no one wrote about it.

Is there a common denominator? There is. In recent weeks, that other journalist, Jared Holt, and I have both published articles about Wohl’s looming trial for criminal securities fraud in California, as well as his liability for non-payment on a 2017 judgment in Arizona, which also involved securities violations.

Wohl and a former business partner pleaded not guilty to two counts of securities fraud this February in front of a judge in Riverside, California. Their trial has been extensively delayed, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.

Additionally, the Arizona Corporation Commission — in conjunction with the Arizona attorney general’s office and legal counsel in California — is actively pursuing Wohl with regards to the $43,000 he still owes the state.

After I posted the second story to Twitter, a user comment pointed me to a since-deleted tweet from a woman named Kristin, who claimed to have worked with Wohl and Burkman on some of their infamously hapless public defamation stunts in the past.

For those unfamiliar with this sordid history, Wohl and Burkman have convinced, coerced and/or paid a number of real people to accuse their political enemies du jour of wrongdoing, most often in the form of absurd acts of sexual impropriety or assault in hotel rooms.

For instance, they accused former special counsel Robert Mueller of raping a woman in a New York hotel room in 2010. They claimed that Sen. Elizabeth Warren had carried on a BDSM-flavored extramarital affair with a young Marine in a Massachusetts Hilton in August 2018. They tricked a young man into signing an affidavit claiming that former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg sexually assaulted him at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in 2019, an allegation the young man immediately recanted, saying that Wohl and Burkman had deceived him.

Most recently the duo appears to have paid a young woman thousands of dollars to accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 79-year-old head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of sexually assaulting her in a Baltimore hotel room in 2014.

Fabrications not confined to hotel rooms include Nancy Pelosi’s Percocet addiction and Sen. Ted Cruz’s “swinger” lifestyle.

None of those accusations, or any of the others, bear any known relationship to reality. Here’s a detailed rundown.link

But “Kristin,” the Twitter account, claimed that this rolling smear campaign was just a reality show. What’s more, they had actually recruited her, Kristin said, though she did not actually participate in any Wohl-Burkman scams.

In one tweet, Kristin wrote, “I have nothing but good things to say about them (and everything was platonic and I was treated well). People shouldn’t judge this girl for backing out because it’s a scary thing to do, nor should they make assumptions about Wohl and Burkman’s intentions.”

Kristin’s Twitter bio described her as a “Model, mom and paralegal. Marylander for life:)”. She had only one follower, and followed about 50 accounts, mostly right-wing media and political figures, including Jacob Wohl’s father, David.

Lo and behold, she had left her direct messages open, allowing anyone to contact her.

At this point I was already about 110% sure that Kristin was actually Jacob Wohl. I reached out.

“Can I get back to you on this?” Kristin replied.

“Sure,” I said. “When’s a good time, do you think?”

“As soon as I figure out how I’m going to handle everything,” she said.

“OK,” I responded. “Let me know.”

I didn’t hear anything until the next day, when Kristin returned to say, “OK, I’ll talk with you. Do you have a number? I had to talk with my lawyers first and decide if I should come out with everything.”

Kristin gave me her number, but I hadn’t seen the new messages. She found my phone number online and called me that night — definitely a woman’s voice. I couldn’t talk, but we set another time.

My wife is a politics hound who also follows Wohl, so I thought she’d get a kick out of this strange tale. I assumed, egotistically, that the whole thing was some weird Wohlian attempt to sting me or weave me into their next farce.

When she saw Kristin’s profile picture, though, her mouth dropped: My wife knew Kristin, who was a real person. They both went to suburban Maryland high schools and had 53 Facebook friends in common, including her closest friends.

Kristin’s full name is Kristin Spealman, and her Twitter bio is accurate: She’s a single mom, a model and paralegal living in Maryland. At various points, she has also been Nancy Pelosi’s drug dealer and Ted Cruz’s concubine.

Spealman told me in a phone call that Burkman cold-called her last September, havingfound her through a local modeling agency.

“He said he worked with Spike TV,” she said. “He said he wanted to meet me. He wanted to talk about this reality show.”

Spealman said she agreed to meet Burkman and Wohl for dinner and drinks at Morton’s Steakhouse in Bethesda, Maryland. Burkman sent a limo. Spealman said she had filet mignon, Burkman had salmon, and Jacob, at the time on a carnivore diet he has since abandoned, had a porterhouse steak — “and gave me his asparagus.”

“We all drank a bit,” she added. Burkman paid with an American Express “Black” card, she said.

At that dinner, Burkman seemed in charge. “I thought Jacob was Jack’s intern at first,” she said. “Just the way he was ordering the limos, stuff like that.” (Spealman shared pictures of what she characterized as her contemporaneous notes, with a ? under the name “Jacob.”)

“There are only like four good-looking girls in D.C.,” she recalls Burkman saying to her. “They were saying they wanted to make me the star of season one of their new reality show.”

The show, she said, would be called“Project 1599,” the street number of Burkman’s home in Arlington, Virginia.The moniker is also his apparently now-prohibited Twitter handle. Burkman was suspended from the site earlier this year for spreading harmful misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. Wohl’s official account was suspended what feels like ages ago.

“Project 1599,” she said, was to be billed as something like a sensationalized political version of the celebrity prank show “Punk’d.” They told her it would air on Spike TV, a network that no longer existed at the time — it had disappeared the year before and re-emerged as the Paramount Network.

(Project 1599 was also the name of the entity that emailed me the recent press release.)

Spealman recalled that Burkman told her she stood to make between $200,000 and $300,000 for season one of Project 1599, which would be released in January 2020. She pointed out that if she became a big star, she would be useless as an incognito prankster. They told her they’d film everything beforehand.

It isn’t insane to entertain the idea that Wohl and Burkman at one point might have had something going at some level with someone at the Paramount Network. They made this same pitch about Spike TV to another recruit. Their accusations against political figures are so ridiculous, and their press conferences so clownish and cheekily scripted, that it seems like reality TV already. They’re clearly in on the joke, on some level.

On another level, of course, there’s no joke for anybody to be “in on.”

At any rate, Spealman signed on. The trio met a few more times, always in the D.C. area and, perhaps in keeping — consciously or otherwise — with a running theme of the smears, always in hotel rooms. Wohl, she said, had a room that he liked at the W. But there were no more meals, she says, only vodka drinks, which were always provided at those afternoon meet-ups.

“Jacob did more of the talking after that,” she said. “And the story soon became that I would come out and say that I was selling painkillers to Nancy Pelosi.”

“I was shocked,” Spealman said. “I was like, ‘Look, I thought this was a different kind of show.’ They asked me to lose weight, to get down to 96 pounds — I’m 103, but they wanted me down to 96, to do talk shows like Ellen DeGeneres.”

Spealman’s idea of stardom was not to appear at a press conference falsely claiming to have sold lethal doses of opioids to the 79-year-old speaker of the House. Burkman offered to talk to any judges for her, should any lawsuits ensue, but she declined.

“That’s when they changed it to the affair with Ted Cruz,” she said. “Which I was also supposed to do.”

They picked Cruz, she said, because the purported reality show’s purported producers wanted to make sure the attacks were not all against Democrats.

“I have lawyers,” Spealman said. “My friends are lawyers, I am a part-time paralegal. I was worried about lawsuits, you know? I expressed that to them and they said ‘This is political satire. If you really feel uncomfortable, in a few weeks you can just come out and say this was all a fake thing.'”

“They said it was performance art,” she said. “So it’s free speech.”

To assure her, she said, Wohl and Burkman offered to make an audio recording of her agreeing to “do something” for money. That way, they said, she’d have evidence it was fake.

It’s unclear whether Wohl and Burkman still have that recording. Neither would comment.

“Jacob was the main manipulator,” Spealman said. “But both were very aggressive.”

She feels intimidated by the duo to this day, and would not readily talk about anything beyond the events of last fall.

Burkman and Wohl scheduled a press conference for mid-October, and on Oct. 16 Spealman went to Burkman’s duplex-style house in Arlington to go over the script.

“When I got there to work on the script, it said at the top, ‘Affidavit of Kristin Spealman.’ That threw me off because I thought it was supposed to be a script,” she said. “I took pics of it, and that made them uncomfortable but I said I needed them to rehearse.”

She later showed those photos to her lawyers, she said, who “freaked out.”

At the rehearsal, Spealman said, Wohl showed her a check for $150,000, which he said would be hers if she went through with the lie as scripted — a claim corroborated by what she said were contemporaneous notes, which she shared in another picture.

Spealman said it appeared to be a business check, not a personal check, but Wohl only briefly allowed her to look at it.

She also shared her photos of the “script,” which is labeled “statement of fact and belief” and, except for the name, is identical to the one they later distributed at the press conference.

In an aside, Spealman noted that Burkman’s dog — a chocolate-colored dachshund named Jack Jr. — took a shine to her.

“Jack said that Jack Jr. doesn’t like many people,” said Spealman, who is blonde. “He told me it must be my Aryan blood.”

“It was weird,” she added. (Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who claims to be half-Jewish and who made an appearance at the Cruz-themed press event staged by Wohl and Burkman — both Jewish — had threatened to kill Jack Jr. earlier this year; Spealman says she never met him.)

Spealman says she told Burkman via text that she was backing out. He called her dozens of times, she said, saying, “This is your big shot.”

“But I never said I wanted a big shot,” she told me.

They rescheduled the press conference, Spealman said — disappointing a gaggle of bored and cynical journalists — swapping her out for “another model in Virginia,” from her same agency, who read the same script, though she used an assumed name.

But then there’s this observation from that same Wohl press event, as noted by journalist Molly Jong-Fast: “Across the street was a documentary film crew who wouldn’t tell me anything about themselves. They were probably just following some sort of Prime Directive where they didn’t want to tarnish the art by becoming part of it. Who can say.”

Spealman saw Wohl again after that, she says, at the Nov. 7 opening for a club called Pandora, which Spealman had brought Wohl in to promote. That’s documented in an Instagram photo.

At the end of that conversation, Kristin leveled with me: She had known we had friends in common, and yes, she knew my wife, though not very well.

Here is why I wanted to write this in the first person.

When Wohl and Burkman accused Robert Mueller of raping a woman in New York, Brett Kavanaugh and Roy Moore were in the headlines. Wohl went to great lengths to try to bait reporters into covering his bogus claims about Mueller, which appeared to be a media honey-trap as much as anything else.

In other words, I’m reluctant to give these guys attention, but at the same time I couldn’t be sure this wasn’t worth writing about, because, as I learned, another smear might be in the works. Allegedly.

Of course the existence of a smear doesn’t mean it is worth covering. But the credible prospect of a possible unlawful future action is another matter.

Still, I wondered if Wohl was setting me up — a thought I relished, until I learned Kristin and my wife had so many connections, which turned my eagerness to a combination of concern and confusion.

Around the same time I contacted Kristin, I received Twitter messages from an account calling itself “Blackbird Consulting,” which had two followers and claimed to be enforcing collection actions against Wohl.

That account has since been suspended. A Twitter spokesperson did not immediately reply to questions about the circumstances.

As for that “model in Virginia” — I found her. Her name is Kylie Garcia-Andrews. She told me in a phone call that Wohl and Burkman had paid her $700 cash to sing the national anthem at an Oct. 9, 2019, press event where Wohl and Burkman trotted out a young man to accuse Sen. Kamala Harris of adultery.

Garcia-Andrews deleted an old Instagram post that linked to that performance — and hashtagged Spike TV.

But despite looking exactly like the woman who took Spealman’s place at the Cruz event, Garcia-Andrews says she was not that woman. Spealman says she was, and here is a video of Wohl calling that woman “Kylie.”

Ford Fischer, an independent journalist and prolific Wohl watcher whose video was linked in the above Instagram post, told me that Garcia-Andrews had friended him last October on Facebook.

“I didn’t know who she was relative to Facebook, but from the bit we talked it seems she was actually at Wohl’s pressers twice: once to sing the anthem, and once as a ‘Ted Cruz accuser,'” he told me, sharing a screenshot that showed they became Facebook friends on Oct. 15, smack in the middle of the Kamala Harris and Ted Cruz events.

“Kylie is a more common name than you may realize,” Kylie told me in a text message denying her involvement in the Cruz stunt. “I mean kylie Jenner has her name on literally everything. It still doesn’t prove its me.” [sic]

The rest of this gets even muddier than what you’ve read already. I feel obligated to report what I was told on the record because it regards potential unlawful conduct involving a public figure. Or so I’m told. But here it is, deconflicted as best as possible.

Spealman, who shared a text-message conversation showing she had been in touch with Wohl as recently as this spring, told me that Wohl and Burkman had been planning “an ongoing thing” with Garcia-Andrews.

“She still does stuff with them,” Spealman said.

Spealman did not feel comfortable detailing what she knew, she said, in part because “it would ruin something they’re doing in the future.” She says she decided to come forward because she wants to distance herself from Wohl and Burkman after experiencing harassment online, while making clear she holds no bad feelings against them

She said she had originally been “asked to be involved” in Wohl and Burkman’s new stunt, adding, “What’s to come is even worse.”

“There’s something ongoing with that doctor at the White House,” Spealman said, evidently meaning Fauci. Wohl and Burkman’s attempted smear of Fauci, earlier this year drew press coverage from only one outlet, and was almost immediately debunked by the woman they paid to carry it out.

Or so it seemed: Spealman told me the whole confession was fake, a setup for a journalist.

After our phone conversation last week, Spealman called Burkman. She says she also tried Wohl, who did not answer.

Following her conversation with Burkman, Spealman told me that Garcia-Andrews said she didn’t want me to write about her because, she claimed, a murderer was after her.

For her part, Garcia-Andrews rejected Spealman’s claim that she was involved in a new “project” with Burkman and Wohl. “They seem shady,” Garcia-Andrews said. “They don’t seem like the best types of guys, so I don’t want to be associated with them.”

Spealman echoed those concerns. “I’m worried about them blackmailing me,” she said. “Jacob created an audio recording of us in a conversation when they offered me $25,000 to do something — I don’t remember what.” She’s worried he may leak that recording to smear her in the press. She also claims to have received ominous phone calls after we began talking — “People breathing into the phone and hanging up” — and believes her computer was hacked.

All things considered, though, there is something strikingly unfair about the position these two women find themselves in, it seems to me. The targets of Wohl and Burkman’s defamatory attacks can afford to ignore them. But the men and women coerced or conscripted to do their dirty work are almost powerless.

But as another Wohl pawn Diane Andrade recently made clear, even if fraudulently, as Spealman claims, they do hold an ace: information.

Spealman said that, depending on what happens after this article is published, she and Kylie might decide to start talking about the other things they know, which, she assures me, are much worse.

She shared some text messages with Wohl about the press release I mentioned above, which I will not be reporting on. She says the subject of that press release is not the same as the alleged new plot they tried to convince her to join.

I find Spealman more credible than Wohl or Burkman, but am also wary of giving them more oxygen for any reason, or playing even a small role in furthering their game.

In 2019, the Daily Beast obtained a document from January of that year showing thatWohl had created a group called the Arlington Center for Political Intelligence, whose purpose, he said, would be to “make shit up” about candidates and public figures in order to manipulate political betting markets and seek to suppress Democratic turnout in 2020.

First Amendment attorney Anne Champion told me, “It would appear that the premise of this company amounts to wire fraud.”

Wohl was soliciting $1 million to fund the project. His smears — and promises of major payouts — kicked into high gear that fall. As his trial date for defrauding investors now approaches, they might kick in again. It is unclear what returns any Arlington Center investors might see or expect at this point, several months ahead of a presidential election.

As for the alleged plot looming on the horizon, Spealman and Garcia-Andrews seem to agree on one thing: The new project, whatever it is — if it ever existed — is now, thanks apparently to my one week of investigation, moribund. So there’s no need to worry about it, whatever it was.

Spokespeople for Dr. Fauci, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Harris, Sen. Warren and Sen. Cruz all declined to comment, as did a former spokesperson for Robert Mueller’s office, the FBI, and multiple spokespeople for Paramount Networks.

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman declined to comment, and would not acknowledge that they knew the women.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/these-documents-are-a-likely-source-of-jacob-wohls-legal-troubles/

---

remember atrazine?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/france-probes-alleged-monsanto-files-opinion-makers-215448544.html

oppo

paris (AFP) - France has opened an preliminary enquiry into alleged illegal files put together for US pesticides maker Monsanto on the views and pliability of hundreds of high-profile figures and media outlets.

Paris judicial police will carry out the probe following a complaint by the daily Le Monde and one of its journalists, whose names appear on the list, the Paris prosecutors office said.

Two anti-pesticide NGOs -- Foodwatch and Generations Futures -- are also preparing to lodge legal complaints over the alleged lists.

The investigators will look into the possible "collection of personal information by fraudulent, unfair or illicit means".

US giant Monsanto allegedly had public relations agency Fleishman Hillard draw up the files on the opinions of the targeted people and media bodies on the controversial weedkiller glyphosate and on genetically modified crops as well as their propensity to be influenced in their opinions.

Figuring on the list are politicians, scientists, journalists -- including four from AFP (Agence France-Presse). Information was collected on their views on pesticides and on Monsanto as well as their leisure pursuits, addresses and phone numbers, according to the France 2 public television channel.

Some of the names were listed under categories such as "priority targets" and "potential allies to recruit", according to reports.

France's former environment minister Segolene Royal, whose name was said to appear on the lists, said the allegation "says a lot about the methods of lobbyists... they carry out spying, infiltration, seek to influence, sometimes financially I imagine", adding that other companies are likely to indulge in similar practices.

Glyphosate developer Monsanto was convicted in the United States in 2018 and 2019 of not taking necessary steps to warn of the potential risks of Roundup -- their weed killer containing the chemical, which two California juries found caused cancer in two users.

German pharmaceutical firm Bayer, which bought Monsanto last year, announced last month that over 13,000 lawsuits related to the weed killer have been launched in the US.

There was no reaction late Friday from Bayer or Fleishman Hillard to the opening of the French investigation.

https://www.ecowatch.com/bayer-secret-list-of-monsanto-critics-2636999291.html

no lnx

den mother to the nerdy brownshirts

COMSTOCK GRIFFIN

As voters turn their attention toward the coming presidential election, an abiding question from the previous one frustrates Democrats: How is it, they wonder, that Al Gore told small fibs and was branded a liar while George W. Bush told big ones and was elected President? Gore's many exaggerations may have been foolish—that he had somehow invented the Internet, that he grew up on a Tennessee farm, and so on. But surely, this line of thinking goes, they paled alongside Bush's audacious claim that he could cut taxes by $1.3 trillion, effortlessly privatize Social Security, and still balance the budget.

A large part of the answer can be found in a BBC documentary titled Digging the Dirt, which was filmed during the 2000 campaign and never aired in the United States. The film centers on a team of Republican opposition researchers —a species that has existed in politics for eons but had recently undergone an evolutionary leap. From deep within the Republican National Committee headquarters the BBC tracked the efforts of this team, whose job it was to discredit and destroy Al Gore.

Political campaigns always attempt to diminish their opponents, of course. What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls "votes and quotes"—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival's legislative record and public statements. Comstock's taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton's top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. "The team we had from 2000," she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, "were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys."

Comstock combined a prosecutor's mentality with an investigator's ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative "storyline" about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. "A campaign is a lot like a trial," Comstock explained. "You want people aggressively arguing their case."

Maligning an opponent, even with his own words and deeds, is a tricky business; voters take a dim view of "negative" politics, and are liable to punish the campaign carrying out the attacks rather than the intended target. Digging the Dirt provides a rare glimpse of how political operatives have learned to use the media to get around this problem, by creating a journalistic black market for damaging stories. During the first debate between Gore and Bush, in October of 2000, the BBC crew stationed itself inside the RNC's war room, filming researchers as they operated with the manic intensity of day traders, combing through every one of Gore's statements for possible misstatements or exaggerations. The researchers discovered two (Gore erroneously claimed never to have questioned Bush's experience, and to have accompanied a federal official to the site of a Texas disaster), and immediately Tim Griffin tipped off the Associated Press. Soon the filmmakers would catch the team exulting as the AP took the story.

Similar scenarios occurred countless times, on both sides, during the campaign. The operatives' sophisticated understanding of the media and their ability to manipulate the reporting of political news helps explain how Gore's public image shifted from that of stiff but competent technocrat at the outset of the campaign to that of serial exaggerator who would say anything to get elected. The steady stream of stories reinforcing this notion took its toll—a fact neatly documented by the filmmakers' shot of the New York Post after the debate: Gore beneath the headline "LIAR! LIAR!"

One film scene of the debate-night frenzy captures the prevalent attitude in national politics. As he directs the investigation of Gore's statements in real time, Griffin, standing next to a sign that reads ON MY COMMAND—UNLEASH HELL (ON AL), pauses for a moment to reflect on his role. "We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war," he says. "We make the bullets."

The Gore campaign also deployed researchers, directed by Chris Lehane, who made his name spinning for the White House during the Clinton scandals and who by reputation is the most feared and loathed Democrat in the "oppo" world. Under Lehane the campaign portrayed Bush as an amiable dunce—a charge supported by many of Bush's actions but one that backfired, by so diminishing expectations that Bush prospered in the debates that doomed Gore.

After Bush's victory Comstock moved on to the Justice Department, and Griffin turned his considerable skills to prosecuting federal drug and firearms cases. Not long ago the RNC brought Griffin back in anticipation of this year's election, and in an indication of just how closely research and communications are intertwined, took the unusual step of bestowing two titles on him: director of opposition research and deputy communications director. From the same room in which he brought down Al Gore, Griffin is leading his team against John Kerry.

The campaign against Gore illustrates how what Bill Clinton referred to as "the politics of personal destruction" has become institutionalized and grimly respectable. Clinton popularized the phrase during his impeachment, when public disgust over years of scandal and partisan warfare had peaked. To avoid backlash, campaigns have become much more careful about attacking their opponents. Shrewd politicians can exploit this anger and still engage in hardball tactics—as Bush did by pledging to be "a uniter, not a divider," even as colleagues unleashed hell on Gore.

A decade ago opposition research was largely the domain of college kids. Today it is a profession run by seasoned investigators, most of whom learned their craft on one side or another of the Clinton scandals (Comstock, Griffin, and David Bossie for the Republicans; Lehane, his partner Mark Fabiani, and Kerry's research director Mike Gehrke for the Democrats). The elite purveyors of "personal destruction"—whom Clinton both feared and employed—have become the leading lights in the low-lit world of opposition research. The prosecutorial tactics and general savagery honed during the Clinton years are the hallmarks of their work. Instead of at high-profile congressional hearings, these battles are conducted from the shadows and waged mostly through the media. As the 2000 election showed, Republicans are particularly adept combatants. Moreover, in John Kerry they have the advantage of an opponent who is largely undefined in the public's thinking. And as in 2000, the election will depend a great deal on how successful Republicans are at the dark art of opposition research.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/06/playing-dirty/302960/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_research

Opposition research (often referred to as oppo) is a term used to classify and describe efforts of supporters or paid consultants of a political candidate to legally investigate the biographical, legal or criminal, medical, educational, financial, public and private administrative and or voting records of the opposing candidate, as well as prior media coverage. The research is usually conducted in the time period between announcement of intent to run and the actual election; however political parties maintain long-term databases that can cover several decades. The practice is both a tactical maneuver and a cost-saving measure.^[1]

Origins and history

In the 1st century B.C., Cicero is said to have gathered information that was damaging to opponents and using it in attacks against them. He accused one political opponent, Catiline, of murdering one wife to make room for another. He attacked Mark Antony in speeches known as the Philippics, eventually prompting Antony to chop off his head and right hand and display them at the Roman Forum.^[2]

Opposition research also has its origins in military planning, as evident in such ancient texts as The Art of War, published in the 5th century B.C. by Sun Tzu. This manual for warriors describes the necessity for understanding an opponent's weaknesses, for using spies, and for striking in moments of weakness.

In 18th century England, opposition research took the form of scandalmongering pamphlet wars between the Whig and Tory parties. Writers such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding participated, often writing under assumed names.^[3] This tradition of robust attack was replicated later in the American colonies, when writers such as Thomas Paine or Benjamin Franklin conducted opposition research and published their results.

The first appearance of the phrase "opposition research" in the New York Times occurred on December 17, 1971, in an article that describes the infiltration of the Edmund Muskie presidential campaign by a female Republican volunteer: "...an article appeared in a Washington newspaper describing the 'opposition research' program at Republican headquarters..."^[4]

Opposition research became systematized in the 1970s when Ken Khachigian, in the Nixon Administration suggested that the GOP keep files on individuals as insurance against future races, rather than "scramble" in an ad hoc fashion race by race.^[1]

Methods in the United States

Opposition research differs immensely depending on the size and funding of a campaign, the ethics of the candidate, and the era in which it is conducted. Information gathering can be classified into three main categories: open-source research enabled by the Freedom of Information Act, covert operations or "tradecraft, " and maintenance of human systems of informants. Increasingly, data-mining of electronic records is used. Information is then stored for future use, and disseminated in a variety of ways.^[5] A local election sometimes has a staff member dedicated to reading through all of the opponents' public statements and their voting records; others initiate whisper campaigns that employ techniques of disinformation or "black ops" to deliberately mislead the public by advancing a pre-determined "narrative" that will present the opponent in a negative light.

Another technique is to infiltrate the opposition's operations and position a paid informant there. "Gray propaganda" techniques are often used to release damaging information to news media outlets without its source being identified properly, a technique inherited from disinformation tactics employed by intelligence agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.^[6]

File-sharing between operatives of political parties is quite common. In the 2008 presidential election, a dossier of opposition research against Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin was posted in its entirety on a political blog site, Politico.com. The file was compiled by the staff of her opponent in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial race, Tony Knowles.^[7]

"Oppo dumps" are used by political campaigns to systematically supply files of damaging information to press outlets, including matters of the public record, video footage from party archives and private collections, as well as private intelligence gathered by operatives. Many prime time television and radio news commentaries rely on this supply of party-generated material because it is free, and therefore more cost-effective than paying investigative reporters.^[8]

Candidates and incumbents who benefit from opposition research often choose to remain uninformed about their campaign's operations and tactics, to insure plausible deniability should criminal charges be brought against researchers.

"Trackers" and videography

Yet another technique is to position information or personnel within media outlets. Often the information is video footage gathered in campaign-funded "tracker programs" wherein videographers use candidates' itineraries to track them and record as many remarks as possible, since anything they say can and will be used against them, as was the cased in former Senator George Allen's "macaca moment."^[9] In the 2006 election cycle, a Virginia senator, George Allen, was unseated because of videotape of the senator calling a videographer/opposition researcher as "macaca" or monkey. The name was considered to be an ethnic slur, and Allen's campaign could not overcome the damage when the incident was broadcast widely in mainstream media and on the internet.^[10]

Digital media and Wikipedia

A 2005 analysis of digital media strategies published by the American Academy of Political Science took the view that new technologies enable "political elites" to use database and Internet technologies to do opposition research more easily, but they use data-mining techniques that outrage privacy advocates and surreptitious technologies that few Internet users understand. Data becomes "richer" about political actors, policy options, and the diversity of actors and opinion in the public sphere, but citizenship is "thinner" by virtue of "the ease in which people can become politically expressive without being substantively engaged."^[11]

Facebook photos became a tool of opposition researchers in California's 32nd congressional district special election, 2009 to replace Hilda Solis. Front-runner Democrat Gil Cedillo sent out mailers targeting 26-year-old Emanuel Pleitez, grouping Pleitez's Facebook photos to suggest that he parties to excess with alcohol, and fraternizes with gangs. The text of the mailer suggested Pleitez, posing with a Latino stage actress and using a Latino voter registration drive hand sign, was "flashing gang signs".^[12]

In 2006, the campaign manager of Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after Cox's opponent, Lt. Gov, Mark Taylor, revealed Cox's campaign had added information from an opposition research dossier to a Wikipedia page on Taylor. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales confirmed that the material had come from an IP address affiliated with the Cox campaign. Citing an Associated Press analysis, CNN reported that Wikipedia being used as a "popular tool" for opposition researchers became so widespread a problem that Wikipedia altered its submission guidelines and set up alerts so that its operators know when Capitol Hill staffers alter Wikipedia content.^[13] However, anyone who wanted to could simply bypass this by using an IP address not associated with Capitol Hill,

Grassroots oppo-research

Opposition research is a necessary component of "grassroots" activist groups. Research on corporate or political opponents may enable activist groups to target neighborhoods from which to increase their numbers, to refine their focus or "target," to pinpoint the target's vulnerabilities, to reveal hidden sources of funding or little-known connections, to investigate scare tactics, and to augment a legislative initiative.^[14]

In the presidential election of 2008, the blog Talking Points Memo pioneered "collaborative citizen-reporting projects" based on groups of volunteers examining public documents that shed light on the George W. Bush administration's U.S. attorneys firings controversy. Other organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation encouraged citizen examination of such public domain records as Mitt Romney's financial disclosure statements and Bill Clinton's income statements.^[15]

Preventative measures

Political strategies for campaigns often include coaching on preventive measures to avoid providing too much information in public disclosure procedures that can provide ammunition for opponents' opposition researchers, particularly in itemized expenditure reports. "To eliminate some of these potential issues your campaign should take the time to review the wording of your campaign finance reports," advises one strategist writing for The Hill:

Instead of reporting that you spent $3,000 on a 'background check and public records search on Congressman X,' list the expenditure as 'issue research' or simply 'research'... One bonus financial filing tip: warn your candidate about spending campaign funds on fancy restaurants for 'strategy meetings.' Eating at Ruth's Chris or Morton's Steak House on your campaign's dime just looks bad. The press may poke a little fun at your candidate's expense; your donors may feel their donation in being misspent and may never give again.^[16]

Funding and institutions

Congressional and presidential opposition research is often conducted by or funded by a political party, lobbying group, political action committee (PAC), or a 527 group that coalesces around a certain issue. In the U.S., both the Republican and Democratic parties employ full-time "Directors of Research" and maintain databases on opponents. In recent years the task of opposition research has been privatized in many areas. Full-time companies with permanent staff specializing in media productions or "grassroots" operations have replaced volunteers and campaign officials. Political media consultants may also opt for astroturfing techniques, which simulate wide popular appeal for a candidate's platform.

In U.S. presidential elections

Opponents of Andrew Jackson in the 1824 and 1828 presidential elections unearthed his marriage records to imply that he was an adulterer for marrying Rachel Robards before she was legally divorced from her first husband. Jackson had married her in 1791 on the strength of a statement from her husband that he had divorced her; Jackson had two wedding ceremonies, the not-recognizable one of 1791 and the legally corrective one of 1794. His political opponents used this information decades later against him, and he fought many duels over his wife's honor. Rachel Robards died before Jackson took office in his first term; he maintained that the stress of the opposition had killed her.^[17]

In 1858, William Herndon, the law partner of Abraham Lincoln, did research in the Illinois State Library to collect "all the ammunition Mr. Lincoln saw fit to gather" to prepare for the run against Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 presidential race.^[18]

In preparation for Ronald Reagan’s debate with President Jimmy Carter in the presidential race 1980, Reagan’s campaign staff acquired under mysterious circumstances a 200-page briefing book, including information on Carter’s strategy, which staffers David Stockman and David Gergen had used to prepare Reagan. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department investigated to see how the information had been obtained by the Reagan camp. Two law professors filed suit in federal district court in Washington to request a special investigation, based on the 1978 Ethics in Government Act.^[19] Carter’s staff believed the book to have been stolen from the White House, but the inquiry did not uncover any credible evidence that any law had been violated. The House of Representatives conducted its own investigation, and concluded in a 2,314-page report that the Reagan staff had two copies of the book, one from Reagan’s campaign director William J. Casey, future head of the Central Intelligence Agency.^[20] James Baker attributed the acquisition of the documents to Casey, who claimed to know nothing about them, and an analysis of Carter campaign documents found in the “Afghanistan” files of Reagan aide David Gergen indicated they came from three White House offices: the National Security Council, Vice President Walter Mondale and Domestic Adviser Stuart Eizenstat.^[21] Many years afterward, Carter himself stated in a PBS interview that the book had been taken by columnist George Will, but Will denied it, calling Carter "a recidivist liar."^[22]

Lee Atwater is considered to be the "father" of modern aggressive "oppo" techniques. Atwater honed his style working in his native South Carolina for Senator Strom Thurmond and to elect Congressman (later Governor) Carroll Campbell. From his posts on the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Atwater encouraged and helped direct what was then the advanced oppo work of the Republican National Committee against Democrats Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. During the 1988 presidential campaign, dozens of RNC researchers worked three shifts around the clock to feed the then-burgeoning 24-hour news cycle. The now-infamous “Willie Horton” TV ads crafted by Floyd Brown helped turn voters away from Dukakis and towards the Republican, although Atwater and Bush were protected by plausible deniability because Brown's ads were independently funded and produced. Academic research into the Bush archives decades later revealed that a Bush staffer, Candice Strother, had released a dossier of information on Willie Horton to Elizabeth Fediay, of the non-profit group that contracted for the ad.^[23] (The Horton story had been completely public for an entire year, part of news coverage that won a Pulitzer Prize for the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune newspaper.) Willie Horton was an African-American convicted murderer released on a weekend furlough during Governor Dukakis’s tenure, who escaped and committed a brutal rape in Maryland, also stabbing his victim's husband.^[24] Atwater is also credited with originating "push polls" and "whisper campaigns" that use disinformation strategies to alienate voters from opponents. A biography of Atwater, quotes him as saying in an interview toward the end of his life that he regretted some of his less ethical techniques.^[25]

In the 1992 presidential campaign, Republicans reported that they spent $6 million on a "state of the art (opposition research) war machine" to investigate Bill Clinton, who was running against George H. W. Bush. In the same election, the Clinton campaign paid more than $100,000 to a private investigator to look into allegations about Clinton's womanizing, investigating more than two dozen women.^[26]

In the 2000 presidential election, longtime opposition researcher and Nixon loyalist Roger Stone was recruited by former Secretary of State James Baker to oversee the recount of the disputed Presidential election in Miami-Dade County in 2000. Stone is credited with organizing the street demonstrations and eventual shut-down of the recount in that pivotal county.^[27]

In the 2004 presidential race, Chris Lehane, a Democratic opposition researcher attracted notoriety and built a reputation not for deploying his skills against Republican opponents, but for using them against other Democrats in the primary races. Working for retired Army general Wesley Clark, Lehane sought to establish a media "narrative" that Howard Dean was hypocritical and dishonest, based on surveys of his administrative archive as governor of Vermont.^[28]

A protege of Atwater's, Karl Rove, is considered to be the "architect" of George W. Bush's election to the governor's office in Texas, and to the presidency in 2000 and 2004. In the 2000 race, Rove is credited with masterminding the push poll that initiated the "John McCain has a black love child" whisper campaign in South Carolina.^[29] Anonymous telephone pollsters, upon determining that a voter was pro-McCain, asked the question, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered a black child out of wedlock?" The question was not overt slander, but it prompted the president of Bob Jones University to launch his own internet campaign against McCain, and succeeded in crippling the trust of voters McCain had attracted. The Bush camp knew, as the general public did not, that in reality, John McCain is the adoptive father of a dark-skinned Bangladeshi refugee who was rescued by his wife Cindi.^[30]

In the 2008 presidential election, opposition researchers for Barack Obama unearthed the fact that John Edwards had paid $400. for haircuts at campaign expense, and supplied Politico's Ben Smith with the tip, according to a memoir later published by campaign manager David Plouffe.^[31] Though the Democratic National Committee continues to fund a research department, after the 2008 presidential election, theNew York Times reported that "The legacy of the Democratic National Committee itself is hardly clear going forward. Mr. Obama effectively subsumed all the responsibilities in his campaign: fund-raising, voter turn-out and opposition research.^[32]

Executive branch of the U.S. government

Franklin Roosevelt Administration: In 1940, the White House accidentally taped a conversation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt instructing a lower level aide to disseminate a rumor about his opponent Wendell Willkie having an extramarital affair: "We can't have any of our principal speakers refer to it, but the people down the line can get it out."^[33]
Johnson Administration: In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent 30 FBI agents to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., to avert assassination attempts, and to monitor his political rival Robert Kennedy and civil rights activists. Johnson later also placed his Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater, under FBI surveillance, with a federal wiretap.^[34]
Nixon Administration: During the Richard Nixon administration, White House staffers compiled lists of names of political opponents, journalists who had criticized Nixon, and artists and actors (such as Jane Fonda and Paul Newman) who had dissented with Nixon policy, especially on the subject of Vietnam, with the intent of prompting Internal Revenue Service investigations. The full extent of Nixon's surveillance of private citizens solely on the basis of their dissent was not known until years after Nixon was forced to resign, as former staff members such as Charles Colson and John Dean began to disclose details.[citation ^needed] Nixon's Enemies List is the informal name of what started as a list of President Richard Nixon’s major political opponents compiled by Charles Colson, written by George T. Bell [1] (assistant to Colson, special counsel to the White House) and sent in memorandum form to John Dean on September 9, 1971. The list was part of a campaign officially known as “Opponents List” and “Political Enemies Project.” The official purpose, as described by the White House Counsel’s Office, was to “screw” Nixon’s political enemies, by means of tax audits from the IRS, and by manipulating “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.”^[35]
Ford Administration: During the Gerald Ford presidency, Deputy Assistant Dick Cheney suggested in a now- infamous memo to Donald Rumsfeld that the White House use the United States Justice Department to conduct opposition research and retaliate against political opponents and critical journalists such as Seymour Hersh and the New York Times, arguing that the executive branch had the power to prosecute journalists as they saw fit, under the provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917.^[36]
Reagan Administration: In 1984, during the Ronald Reagan presidency, the Republican National Committee formed The Opposition Research Group, with its own budget of $1.1 million. These staff amassed information on eight Democratic presidential candidates based on data from voting records, Congressional Record speeches, media clippings and transcripts, campaign materials, all of which was stored on a computer for easy access. In this way the Reagan team was able to track inconsistencies and attack them. This original data base evolved into a network that linked information gleaned by Republicans in all 50 states, creating a master data base accessible to high-ranking Republican staff, even aboard Air Force One.^[37] Though this RNC database was accessible to both the Reagan White House and campaign team, no evidence has surfaced that U.S. federal dollars funded The Opposition Research Group or its efforts.
Clinton Administration: During the Bill Clinton administration, the "Filegate" scandal erupted when White House staffers said to be acting on the directions of First Lady Hillary Clinton improperly accessed 500 FBI files compiled for security checks of Reagan and Bush staffers in previous administrations. Craig Livingstone, said to be hired by Mrs. Clinton with dubious credentials, resigned amid public outcry. In testimony under oath during the Kenneth Starr special prosecutor's investigation, Mrs. Clinton stated that she had neither hired Livingstone nor improperly perused the files.^[38]

George W. Bush Administration: Two former opposition researchers for the RNC appointed to Justice Department posts, Timothy Griffin and Monica Goodling, were implicated in efforts to use data collected on Democratic-appointed federal attorneys as ground for dismissal. See Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy. See also Karl Rove. Also during this administration, Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), an intelligence gathering arm of the Pentagon was disbanded in 2008, after investigations into the bribery activities directed at Duke Cunningham revealed that the U.S. government kept a sizeable database of information about 126 domestic peace activist groups, including Quakers, about 1,500 "suspicious incidents" including peace demonstrations outside armed forces recruiter offices, even though the groups posed no specified threat to national security. The program was known as Talon. About two years elapsed between the program's disbanding and the Post report. The Washington Post quoted an unnamed "official" as saying,"On the surface, it looks like things in the database that were determined not to be viable threats were never deleted but should have been," the official said. "You can also make the argument that these things should never have been put in the database in the first place until they were confirmed as threats."^[39]
Barack Obama Administration: In February 2009, Shauna Daly, a former opposition researcher for the Democratic National Committee was appointed as a researcher for the White House's Office of Legal Counsel. Daly was Barack Obama's deputy research director during the presidential campaign, spent much of the cycle rebutting viral online attacks on Obama's character and biography under the rubric of "Stop the Smears." Shortly thereafter, amid speculations that she would be conducting research against political opponents, she was reassigned as Research Director to the DNC. Politico.com reported on February 27, 2009 that "the counsel's office -- which doesn't face the sort of rapid-response demands that were common in the late Clinton years -- doesn't plan to fill the research post."^[40] The American Spectator reported on its "Washington Prowler" blog that Daly was posted in the White House Counsel's Office for "about a month," and thus had access to "reams of Bush administration documents related to such things as the firing s of U.S. Attorney, the use and internal debate over the USA PATRIOT Act, FISA and the Scooter Libby and Karl Rove investigations. The "Prowler" quoted "a DNC staffer" as saying, "She realized that she could do more with all the material she saw outside of the building than inside where she'd be bound by the rules and legalities of the White House Counsel's Office. Now she isn't. She's good at what she does; her time at the White House means we've got a mother load (sic) of material that will have Republicans scrambling. At least that's what we hope."^[41]

U.S. Supreme Court

In 1916, after President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis for the Supreme Court, "concerned" citizens seeking to block his confirmation offered information that Brandeis was a "radical Zionist," even though he was not a practicing Jew. Brandeis aggressively outmaneuvered his detractors by mounting his own opposition research efforts, including a carefully constructed chart that exposed the social and financial connections of the group, mostly from Boston's Back Bay, and including Harvard president Lawrence Lowell, as well as a group headed by former President William Howard Taft and a host of American Bar Association past presidents. Brandeis sent the chart to Walter Lippman at the New Republic who penned an editorial condemning "the most homogeneous, self-centered, and self-complacent community in the United States." Brandeis was confirmed after four months of hearings, in a Senate vote of 47-22.^[42]

Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, prompting a Senate floor speech from Democratic Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, which later became known as the "Robert Bork's America" speech:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is -- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.Kennedy's speech prompted a rapid-response opposition research effort from Democrats, but the White House waited two and a half months to respond. The Senate Judiciary Committee, under the direction of Delaware senator and presidential hopeful Joseph Biden, commissioned a report in response to the materials Reagan's staff had released in support of Bork's nomination. Prepared by a panel of lawyers, including two Duke University law professors, the 78-page became known as "The Biden Report." The report detailed Bork's record, and analyzed the pattern of his rulings, and deeming him to be a conservative "activist" rather than an impartial jurist. Ultimately, Bork's embattled nomination failed, and Anthony Kennedy (no relation to Ted) was later confirmed to fill the position.^[43][44] The fierce research-based opposition to Bork's nomination attracted significant media attention, even though a Gallup Poll on the eve of the confirmation vote showed that very few Americans could name the nominee in question, much less recall his rulings.^[45] A new verb was later coined; "to bork" a candidate or nominee by mounting such voluminous research and vocal opposition that the person in question would be forced to withdraw.^[46]

After President George W. Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Boston Globe reported that Republican conservative advocacy groups were conducting opposition research against her: "Groups are circulating lists of questions they want members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Miers at her confirmation hearings. The activists' thinly veiled hope is that Miers will reveal ignorance of the law and give senators a reason to oppose her."^[47] Miers later withdrew her name from consideration for the court.

On July 7, 2005, soon after the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the Democratic National Committee gathered and circulated information on the "anti-civil rights" and "anti-immigrant" rulings of Samuel A. Alito, Jr., by then nominated by President George W. Bush to replace her. Upon inspection, the documents were revealed to have been amended by Devorah Adler, research director for the DNC. Alito's "record" had been pointedly altered to present him in a negative light. While the incident was not unusual, it received publicity in prominent places because it drew attention to the "meta-data" that is often unwittingly stored in documents that are altered and forwarded electronically.^[48]

On May 2, 2009, after Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced his intent to retire from the court, the New York Times reported that Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, had noted that conservatives were "focusing opposition research efforts on 17 women, whom they have divided into two tiers based on their perceived chances."^[49]

U.S. states

See Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

Seven aides to members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives pleaded guilty on January 7, 2010, to illegal use of state resources for campaign activities, including opposition research against the political opponents of incumbent officeholders during 2007. These seven were Democrats; a total of 25 indictments have been handed down to a mix of Democrats and Republican politicians.^[50]

In state politics

During Lamar Alexander's 2002 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Alexander's campaign staff received an anonymous mailing of a photograph of opponent Bob Clement obviously serving as a board member of a failed bank whose owners had been imprisoned for bank fraud. When the Alexander campaign raised the issue of Clement's financial ties with the convicted felons, Clement denied any connection. When the Alexander campaign produced the photograph as evidence, Clement claimed his role was only an informal advisory one.^[51]

In early July 2009 Alaska governor Sarah Palin announced that she would be resigning as governor, partly due to complications from opposition research and ethics inquiries after her inclusion on the 2008 GOP presidential race ballot as John McCain's running mate. At a later news conference Palin told reporters, "Obviously conditions had changed so drastically on August 29, the day I was tapped to be VP," she said. "The opposition research and the games that began there — which I think is the new normal in Alaska politics, until I hand the reins over to Sean Parnell — have been so distracting."^[52]

In the Pennsylvania state legislature in July 2009, former state House Democratic Campaign Committee Chair, Rep. Stephen Stetler found himself amidst an investigation when he rejected a plan that would have shifted the job of opposition research from employees on the state payroll to private firms. Attorney General Tom Corbett alleged that millions in public funds were paid to state employees who did such research on the 2006 and 2004 campaigns of Democrats in the state. Stetler left the House after 2006 to become the state's revenue secretary. A former aide, Dan Wiedemer testified before grand jurors that the suggestion to remove politically motivated research from the hands of public employees "was more or less shot down." Though Stetler has not been charged, 12 former House members and members of their staff were charged with diverting public funds for political campaign work.^[53] Stetler was among those subpoenaed, said Chuck Ardo, a spokesman for Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell. The hearing will be held before President Judge Richard Lewis in September.^[54]

In other countries

Australia

In October 2011, a media storm erupted in Australia over the leaking of 'dirt files' compiled by the Liberal National Party and further revelations that a former Australian Labor Party operative had been engaged to help compile the dossiers.^[55]

Despite protestations that key party personnel had no knowledge of the dossiers it was later revealed a Liberal National Party opposition research strategist had been compiling the files as part of a SWOT analysis at previous elections which formed the basis of negative attack messaging for a 'rapid response unit'.^[56]

Mass media ethics

The practice of using tips from opposition research sources was examined in 1994 by Howard Kurtz, media analyst for the Washington Post. Kurtz surveyed the major networks, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and other influential media outlets, and found varying levels of use of oppo research information on David Hale as a witness in the Whitewater controversy. At this time, Brown confirmed that he had been the source of four mainstream media stories that had received attention from the Columbia Journalism Review because they bore striking resemblance to the opposition research being disseminated by Citizens United.^[57]

"Far from being detached observers, reporters constantly call oppo staffs looking for tidbits and sometimes trading information," wrote three reporters, Matthew Cooper, Gloria Borger, and Michael Barone, for U.S. News & World Report in 1992.^[58]

Political infighting

In the spring of 2007, Roger Stone, a political consultant in the employ of New York state senator Joseph Bruno, was forced to resign after leaving threatening phone messages on the answering machine of the 85-year-old father of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, alleging that Spitzer's campaign finances were conducted improperly.^[59] In November of that same year, Stone sent a letter to the FBI detailing Spitzer's sexual preferences with prostitutes and sexual props, right down to his black calf-length socks.^[60] Stone was considered to be an authoritative source because he frequented the same prostitutes as a client himself. A subsequent Justice Department investigation produced evidence that ultimately led to Spitzer's resignation as governor. Joseph Bruno, Stone's client, has been a longtime political enemy of Eliot Spitzer.

In popular culture

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/opposition-research/

https://www.gop.com/research/ bs

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/opinion/inside-the-republicans-opposition-research-machine.html?_r=0

The vast right-wing conspiracy Hillary Rodham Clinton once cited in 1998 works from cluttered offices on Capitol Hill, led by a man who was in high school when she first made the charge.

Raj Shah runs the Republican National Committee’s opposition research arm, a beehive of two dozen tech-savvy idealists who have already spent two years searching through decades of government documents, tax filings, TV footage and news archives. One of their colleagues in Arkansas turns up every day in the Clinton presidential library to probe the Clintons’ accumulated past. More than 330 Freedom of Information Act requests have netted 11,000 pages of records, and counting. The R.N.C. has also retained Mark Zaid, an attorney who also is representing the Gawker website in suing the State Department over records from Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary of state.

Today, presidential candidates start campaigning two years before the first primary vote is cast. That gives researchers a head start in finding flip-flops, fibs and perhaps most damaging of all, moments when politicians are caught being themselves.

Both political parties conduct opposition research — for proof of the Democrats’ prowess, there’s the “macaca moment” in 2006 that torpedoed the re-election of Senator George Allen in Virginia. In this political cycle Republican investigators have been given a rare gift: a clear front-runner with a long and public history.

The Republicans boast that their research shop is bigger and better than the Democratic National Committee’s, but in fact the Republicans’ biggest advantage is Mrs. Clinton herself. While the Democrats have more than a dozen Republican candidates to research, the Republicans can focus their energies entirely on her. The fodder seems endless: over 40 years of public life, she has changed roles, funding mechanisms, policy positions, even regional accents.

Mrs. Clinton “may not like those of us willing to hold her accountable, but she only has herself to blame,” Mr. Shah says. “We’re simply citing her own past words, positions and actions.”

The committee shares its work with reporters who cover the presidential campaign. Other times, it seeks federal investigations on issues revealed by news reports, in cases like the discovery by Reuters of errors in the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s tax records and The Times’s reporting on Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.

The crew’s findings can be amusing. In July, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers corralled the press behind a clothesline as she walked in a Fourth of July parade in New Hampshire, a tactic that irked reporters. Mr. Shah’s team unearthed showing Bill Clinton doing the very same thing during a parade in Arkansas.

But the research is often more damaging. Each day, four young Republicans sit in the R.N.C.’s “war room,” furnished with a dozen TVs and computers that capture every broadcast, and watch for gaffes, inconsistencies and flip-flops. When Mrs. Clinton said recently that she is opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade pact she called a “gold standard” when she was secretary of state — they were able to send out her contradictory quotes on social media almost instantly. They did the same thing when she introduced a broad plan for gun control after largely opposing it in her last presidential run.

In New Hampshire this month, when Mrs. Clinton repeated a questionable story about wanting to join the Marines in her youth, the Republicans could catalog the times she made that claim in the past and the shifting reasons she gave. Recently they compiled a list of all the groups with ties to the financial sector and other industries with business before the federal government that paid Bill and Hillary Clinton millions in speaking fees well before the Clintons released lists on their own.

Americans may hate what this dredging enterprise says about modern campaigning, but it’s a legitimate part of the process, and any seasoned politician is likely to have inconsistencies, failures and embarrassments. What really keeps the opposition research machine humming are efforts by the candidates themselves to be all things to all voters, sacrificing their credibility.

Mrs. Clinton has been through all this before, but it has not taught her the value of transparency. Her tailers’ stated goal: portraying her as someone who will say anything to win. Countering that will mean declaring what she stands for and defending, not tailoring, her positions at this late hour — which, of course, isn’t an easy thing for any politician to do.

OMG mayer NYer 5/16

He showed me a tiny video camera that had been hidden inside an Aquafina water bottle, and others embedded in a wristwatch and in an iPod Shuffle. A device in his shirt button, which used Bluetooth technology, could relay live audio to his control room. He argued, “What I do is the truest form of journalism there is. We hit the record button and show people what we found.”

The political left also outsources much of its dirty work to privately funded super PACs and dark-money groups. After the Democrats were eviscerated in the 2010 midterm elections—the first congressional campaigns after the Citizens United decision—an independently funded group namedAmerican Bridge 21st Century began supplying opposition research to Democratic groups and candidates. The network was founded by David Brock,a self-described former “conservative hit man” who became notorious in the early nineties for having described Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” In the aughts, Brock, who is gay, joined the Democratic Party—in part because he found the Republican Party homophobic—bringing with him an insider’s expertise in cutthroat politics. He describes American Bridge, which employs a hundred and fifty people, as a political “utility” for progressives.

The American Bridge network includes Media Matters, a watchdog operation that identifies what it sees as distortions by the right-wing press, andCorrect the Record, a rapid-response unit that focusses on defending Hillary Clinton. Brock’s group also oversees political action committees, dark-money nonprofit organizations, and at least fifty video “trackers,” who hound Republican candidates in the hope of recording politically damaging moments.Video trackershave been mainstays of campaigns since 2006, when a Democratic volunteer upended George Allen, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, by releasing a video of him uttering a racist slur. In 2012, one of the trackers with Brock’s organization captured Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican running for the Senate, defending “legitimate rape.” With American Bridge’s success has come funding, largely from labor unions and wealthy liberals. One of the biggest contributors this year is George Soros—which may help explain why he was the object of an O’Keefe sting.

After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election, conservative operatives concluded that they needed their own putatively independent negative-campaign machine. Out of this partisan arms race grew America Rising—the unofficial oppo-research affiliate of the Republican Party—which was founded in 2013 by Matt Rhoades, the former head of Romney’s campaign. Based in Arlington, Virginia, it diverges from Brock’s network in one crucial respect: It is a limited-liability corporation. Instead of relying on charitable and political donations, America Rising serves as a for-profit vender to conservative clients, who pay it to conduct customized negative research.

Rhoades and others declined to respond to interview requests, but when I stopped by America Rising’s headquarters, on May 18th, the office was filled with young researchers bent over their laptops. The walls were decorated with photographs of conservative icons (though Trump’s portrait seemed to be missing). An office door was covered with bull’s-eye targets, and a sign reminded staffers of the “Research Checklist: Nexis, Google Alerts, Facebook, Twitter.”

Brock told me that his group had rejected the vender model. “We didn’t want to be under clients’ thumbs,” he said. “If you work for them, you’re subservient. We wanted to build an independent progressive infrastructure.” Recently, some donors wanted video trackers to trail the Koch brothers, but Brock turned them down. American Bridge does a huge amount of oppo research on the Kochs, but Brock says he believes that tracking private citizens is unethical. He claims that he has also rejected the use of subterfuge. “We’re not in that game,” he says.

By contrast, in late April the dark-money arm of Rhoades’s group, America Rising Squared, announced the creation of a negative campaign to target leading environmentalists as well as prominent donors to environmental causes and candidates. The campaign’s initial budget was a hundred thousand dollars, which, among other things, would cover the extensive use of video trackers. According to the political tip sheet The Hill, the campaign would subject environmentalists to “the same level of scrutiny . . . that opposition research firms apply to presidential candidates.” America Rising Squared’s executive director,Brian Rogers, told The Hill that his group planned to hold “the Environmentalist Left accountable for their epic hypocrisy and extreme positions which threaten America’s future prosperity.”

Almost simultaneously, in early May, the organization announced the launch of an affiliated venture, run by many of the same operatives, called Definers Public Affairs. Definers offers to wage political-style negative campaigns, for profit, on behalf of undisclosed private clients, including corporations. According to its Web site, Definers will “create dossiers” on opponents, monitor them from a “full-service war room,” and build both “grassroots” alliances and “a paid online presence.” This raises the possibility that undisclosed business interests are paying to choose the targets they want Republican operatives to attack.

Soon after the campaign against environmentalists was announced, Bill McKibben, who teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College, in Vermont, got an alarming phone call from a librarian at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, who supervises a literary archive to which McKibben had contributed his research papers. McKibben has been an outspoken activist against the Keystone XL pipeline, and in 2008 he co-founded 350.org, a “global grassroots climate movement.” For many years, he was a staff writer for this magazine. (He is now a regular contributor to theNew York Review of Books, where he recently reviewed a book of mine.) He is a political thinker, but not a candidate, a major political donor, or a paid campaign operative.

The Texas librarian, Diane Warner, told McKibben that a man had shown up at the archive and requested copies of all his papers—fifty-four boxes of documents. The man identified himself as Aaron Goss, and said that he worked for Definers Public Affairs. Goss spent a week copying pages from McKibben’s archive. Meanwhile, as McKibben was getting ready to speak about the environment at a church in Durham, New Hampshire, an unfamiliar man aimed a video camera at him. The next day, a wordless two-second snippet of footage appeared online, showing McKibben looking at the camera and then turning away uncomfortably, to the accompaniment of the song “Show Me That Smile.” The video, which was titled “Bill McKibben: Ready for His Closeup,” was posted to the Twitter account of Corenews.org.

The site is another recent creation of America Rising Squared, as is an app called Grill, which enables users to track the location of ideological enemies, including Hillary Clinton, and lists hostile questions to ask at public events, such as “Will you drop out of the Presidential race if you are indicted?” Within days, another contentless video snippet of McKibben popped up, this time showing him in Australia. The threat was clear: wherever he went, his enemies would be recording him.

Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.

McKibben told me, “I have no fear of debating these people on the issues, but this is just intimidation.” He added, “It’s bad enough to do this to anyone who runs for office. But to do it to anyone who dares protest?”

Tom Steyer,the retired hedge-fund billionaire who runs the environmental-action group NextGen Climate and has been one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, is another target of America Rising Squared. Corenews.org has featured posts calling Steyer hypocritical, because he made a fortune investing in fossil fuels. America Rising Squared has accused him of self-interest in supporting green energy, as he has substantial investments in solar power. Steyer says that this is “complete and utter nonsense,” because his investments are held by trusts and structured in a way that any profits are transferred to charity. “They have to know they’re lying,” Steyer said. “It’s completely dishonest, unethical, and pitiful. And it’s creepy.” He says that the anonymously funded attacks won’t stop him, but he worries that such campaigns may deter others from engaging in activism. As he puts it, they “are another reason people are reluctant to get involved in politics.”

It may be that the shock value of such exposés is diminishing. A recent series of sting videos against Planned Parenthood, created by a group called the Center for Medical Progress, involved deceptions so devious—including an attempt by undercover operatives to buy fetal tissue—that the campaign backfired. Pro-choice activists united in anger at the sting’s perpetrators, and a Texas grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing and indicted the C.M.P. In Presidential politics, gaffes may be less damaging. As Brock notes, “In the year of Trump, people are more inured to the outrageous.”

O’Keefe promises that his covert documentary of the Hillary Clinton campaign will command attention. But on May 19th he publicly conceded defeat in the Open Society Foundations investigation. In an interview posted on Breitbart News, he confessed that he had “been forced to abandon an ambitious undercover investigation into billionaire left-wing financier George Soros.” O’Keefe acknowledged that he “forgot to hang up” the phone, but declined to be more specific about the operation, saying, “I don’t like to reveal the tactics of what we do.” He apologized to his supporters and promised that his many other investigations had not been compromised. “Unfortunately, I’m burned on this particular investigation,” he said, adding that he was “very disappointed,” because he believes that the influence of billionaires such as Soros is “the most important topic undermining democracy.” But he concluded, “If I wanted to be perfect, I would give up.” ♦

---

2010

Digging for Dirt

Opposition researchers are an accepted, if not beloved, reality of modern politics. More out in the open, they’re playing big roles in 2010 races.

By David Mark | October 4, 2010

This spring, Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal seemed to have a clear path to the US Senate. He’d angled for an opening to Washington for years, and when longtime senator Chris Dodd announced his retirement, Blumenthal became the anointed Democratic nominee in the deep-blue Nutmeg State.

That is, until a bombshell New York Times article on May 17 detailed a series of Blumenthal speeches citing his military service during the Vietnam era. “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Blumenthal said at a 2008 ceremony honoring veterans and senior citizens who sent presents to soldiers overseas. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it—Afghanistan or Iraq—we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

The problem, the Times noted, was that although Blumenthal had been a member of the Marine Corps Reserve after college, he had never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970, including one to serve as a special assistant to Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Blumenthal, the Times reported, “took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war.”

The revelation of Blumenthal’s misstatements threw his campaign off track and sent him scrambling to explain his military history before veterans’ groups across Connecticut.

Blumenthal’s Republican Senate opponent, Linda McMahon, quickly took credit for having fed the damaging information to the Times.

“McMahon Strikes Blumenthal in NYT Article,” the McMahon camp proclaimed on its Web site that day. “The Blumenthal Bombshell comes at the end of more than 2 months of deep, persistent research by Republican Linda McMahon’s Senate campaign.”

McMahon, the wealthy former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, told a Hartford television station, “I can tell you we had some research, we shared it, and I think we accomplished the story.”

Less than two weeks later, the Washington Post reported that Republican Illinois congressman and Senate candidate Mark Kirk had admitted embellishing his military record. Kirk claimed to have received the US Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award for his service with NATO forces during the Serbian conflict in the late 1990s; a different citation was awarded to his whole unit.

The story made clear the source of the unflattering information about Kirk: “The Post’s inquiries were sparked by complaints from a representative of state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, Kirk’s Democratic opponent in the Illinois Senate race.”

It’s no secret that political operatives feed reporters damaging information about opponents. But the 2010 election cycle has seen more campaigns than ever admitting to, and in some cases bragging about, their opposition-research handiwork. A part of the consulting world that was once considered the dark underbelly of political campaigns is no longer hidden. “Oppo” researchers are emerging from the unmarked strip malls where they’ve long toiled.

“In the old days, the opponents of our clients would hold press conferences denouncing our hiring—just our existence would be controversial,” says Jason Stanford, founder of Texas-based Stanford Research, a Democratic firm. “But there is a real openness now.”

It’s hard to keep a secret in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. Stanford believes the rise of social networking has made candidates more open. “The flow of information can’t be bottled up,” he says. “There’s an expectation that all information available to a campaign will be out there.”

Larry Zilliox, a private investigator based in Bristow, Virginia, whose firm trains opposition researchers of both parties, says there are often misconceptions about what such researchers do. “It’s just research,” Zilliox says. “It shouldn’t be cloak-and-dagger. In the past, everybody was so hush-hush about it that it automatically took on this taint of undercover work.”

Says Dennis Johnson, who was a Democratic opposition researcher before joining George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management: “It still gets back to the basics—find something that shows this guy is a phony. Absolutely the worst is lying about your military résumé.

“Policy stuff—unless it’s the hot buttons like abortion or gun control—doesn’t work too well. It’s the personal stuff that matters. It’s really getting down to the fundamentals of whether this is the type of person you want in office.”

Recent campaign cycles have demonstrated what opposition research that’s done right can yield, says Eric Ohlsen, a Democratic opposition researcher based in Alexandria.

“Campaigns are becoming more transparent about opposition research. After watching what the Swift Boat Vets did to Senator [John] Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign, candidates realized that for them to have the ability to do the same thing to their opponents, they would need professional opposition research.”

Many opposition researchers still prefer to remain in the shadows. And some people who start off bragging about their use of opposition research learn to dial it back. In Connecticut, Senate candidate McMahon’s operation quickly realized that dirt-digging can leave a bad taste in the mouths of voters. Shortly after boasting of the May campaign hit on opponent Blumenthal’s military service, McMahon’s campaign scrubbed its Web site clean of any reference to its role.

“There’s a fine line for candidates in using research,” says Alex Vogel, former deputy counsel for the Republican National Committee. “In the ideal world, you want the information to come out but you don’t want to be the source. There’s always a concern it blows back on you and makes you look bad for bringing it up.”

GOP consultant Darren Eustance, owner of Malleus Political Strategies in Raleigh, North Carolina, puts it more bluntly: “In my experience, oppo is still treated like the political-consultant equivalent of the crazy uncle—everyone knows he’s there, but they don’t like to talk about him. I still sign nondisclosure agreements with all my clients forbidding me from publicly divulging any association with their campaigns.”

Digging up dirt and highlighting unflattering aspects of the opposition’s life have a long political history. In the 1828 presidential election, Andrew Jackson’s opponents unearthed his marriage records, seeking to imply that the hero of the Battle of New Orleans was an adulterer for marrying Rachel Robards in 1791 before she was legally divorced from her first husband. Jackson won the White House over President John Quincy Adams anyway, avenging a bitter loss four years earlier. But the opposition researchers’ work may have taken a toll: Rachel died shortly before Jackson took office—a result, he contended, of the stress of having her honor called into question.

Even Abraham Lincoln wasn’t above engaging in oppo research. In preparation for Lincoln’s 1860 presidential campaign against Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, combed the Illinois State Library to collect “all the ammunition Mr. Lincoln saw fit to gather” against his Democratic rival.

The art of opposition research came into its own during the 1988 presidential election when Massachusetts criminal Willie Horton was turned into a household name by the campaign of Republican nominee George H.W. Bush. But the idea originated with a primary rival to eventual Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis: Senator Al Gore of Tennessee.

At a New York Daily News debate in the spring of 1988, Gore tied Massachusetts governor Dukakis to “weekend passes” for criminals in state prisons. But Gore didn’t mention the name of William Horton—later shortened to “Willie”—who, while serving a life sentence for murder without possibility of parole, was the beneficiary of a Massachusetts weekend-furlough program. Horton didn’t return from his furlough and ultimately committed assault, armed robbery, and rape.

After Vice President Bush won the Republican nomination, James Pinkerton, an aide to Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater, got the debate transcript through the LexisNexis database. Pinkerton had no idea what Gore was talking about, so he called Bush campaign aide Andrew Card, a former Massachusetts state legislator. Card said the prison-furlough issue had been a huge deal in the Bay State for a year, which piqued the Bush campaign’s curiosity. Pinkerton and colleagues received faxes and FedExes from Boston on the case, and a few days later Pinkerton took it to Atwater.

“He got it immediately,” Pinkerton says. Shortly thereafter, the Bush campaign did a focus group in Paramus, New Jersey, “and could see that the issue, when explained to regular people, was an absolute crusher.”

Bush 41 first used Willie Horton in a speech to the Texas Republican convention in June 1988. Later that year, the Bush campaign began airing a now-famous “revolving door” ad, but without a picture of Horton. An independent GOP-affiliated group ran a similar commercial with Horton’s picture included.

For much of America’s political history, opposition research was done on an ad hoc basis. But as campaigns became more professional and expensive, the technique became institutionalized. For the past dozen years or more, both the Republican and Democratic national committees have employed full-time research directors and maintained databases on opponents.

“In the space of ten years,” says Vogel, now a partner at the lobbying and consulting firm Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, “we’ve gone from a bunch of people with notebooks scouring county courthouses to a complex, computerized operation. There was a time when people thought it was sneaky. But now it’s acknowledged.”

Sometimes unflattering information is used as a brushback pitch to keep a potential opponent out of a race. Other times, negative scoops are held back until late in a campaign, when they can be deployed to maximum effect.

The full effect of a good opposition-research operation often isn’t clear until after Election Day. In the 2008 cycle, researchers for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama unearthed evidence of John Edwards’s $400 haircuts, billed at his campaign’s expense. Campaign manager David Plouffe writes in his memoir, The Audacity to Win, that he supplied the tip to a reporter. The planted information reinforced the image of Edwards as a preening narcissist, and the North Carolinian was soon out of the race.

The Democratic National Committee this year is taking openness in opposition research to a new level. In June, it launched a Web site to collect damaging recordings of Republicans with the explicit goal of capturing another “macaca moment”—a reference to the video of Virginia Republican senator George Allen calling an Indian-American Democratic videographer that name at a 2006 campaign event, footage credited with contributing to his loss to Democrat Jim Webb.

“Macaca” remains the gold standard of opposition research. And the DNC is betting that its political crowd-sourcing efforts, officially dubbed the Accountability Project, will yield more self-immolations by Republican candidates.

But reeling in a macaca-style big fish is relatively rare. Just as prosecutors chasing corrupt pols rarely get hard evidence of cash being exchanged for legislative favors—or, as in the case of convicted former Louisiana congressman William Jefferson, stored in a home freezer—opposition researchers usually deal with more subtle information that’s tougher to explain in a sound bite.

Fortunately for campaign operatives, they often don’t need to start from scratch. File sharing among political pros in the same parties is common. During the 2008 campaign, Politico obtained a detailed, 63-page dossier of opposition research against Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin that had been compiled by the staff of Tony Knowles, her Democratic opponent in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial race. The information quickly made its way into Democratic talking points against the new GOP running mate.

Perhaps the most effective use of opposition research this year came in the Republican primary for Idaho’s 1st Congressional District. The seat is a prime pickup opportunity for Republicans, with freshman Democratic congressman Walt Minnick considered among his party’s most endangered incumbents.

Republican strategists thought they had a top recruit in Vaughn Ward, a former CIA operations officer. With an endorsement from Palin, Ward’s nomination over GOP primary rival Raul Labrador, a state representative, seemed inevitable.

But then an Internet video appeared revealing that Ward had lifted campaign lines from President Obama, a bad-enough offense under normal circumstances but particularly damaging in a GOP primary in one of the nation’s reddest states. Things got worse when it came out that Ward didn’t own the pickup truck he’d used in a campaign ad. News stories also noted that he hadn’t disclosed his wife’s income from Fannie Mae while he was bashing bank bailouts. Reporters discovered that he’d once paid his property taxes late. When the votes came in, Ward lost to Labrador by 48 to 39 percent.

Sometimes potent information simply isn’t unearthed. Illinois Republican Senate candidate Mark Kirk had served in the House since 2001 and survived a series of close races for his congressional seat. But questions about his military-service claims never arose.

In the pre-Internet era, opposition research was laborious work. Digging up tax liens, civil lawsuits, divorce petitions, and other potentially damaging documents took days or weeks; now they often can be discovered with a few keystrokes on LexisNexis and other databases.

“I’ve been in steamy country courthouses in southern Alabama in the middle of summer,” says GW’s Dennis Johnson, who in his spare time runs CongressionalBadboys.com, a bipartisan look at congressional scandals, corruption, and malfeasance. Now, he says, what used to take weeks and months to research is often available online in minutes.

But sometimes the juiciest documents aren’t available on the Internet. The 2009 campaign of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell had to endure weeks of scrutiny after the Washington Post reported on his two-decades-old master’s thesis at Regent University, in which he outlined his conservative social views and spelled out how they should be incorporated into GOP governance. Somebody knew about that document and likely tipped off the reporter, who looked up the 93-page document, says Zilliox, the private investigator.

“You can know everything there is to know about the ‘intertubes,’ ” observes Eustance. “But if you don’t know how to use a microfilm machine or walk into a county courthouse in East Sweet Nowhere, USA, and find old trial records and tax liens, you shouldn’t be doing oppo, period.”

Because of their growing number and prominence, opposition researchers are encountering a new challenge: Government officials are increasingly hostile to Freedom of Information Act queries and official-records requests at the state and local levels. They’re now asking researchers for political affiliations and client names. In part this is a reaction to researchers’ requests for catchall paper trails on opponents, which can clog a system. But more and more, researchers must budget time and money for obtaining public information. There seems to be little fear of retribution among FOIA bureaucrats for breaking the law by withholding documents, say veteran opposition researchers.

News stories in the closing weeks of this year’s campaign cycle will document the shortcomings and deficiencies of candidates. Behind each negative article there’s likely an opposition researcher who made the reporter aware of the information.

Linda McMahon’s campaign’s admission of playing a role in advancing a negative story about her opponent violated an unwritten rule. Political operatives and reporters frequently engage in a Kabuki dance concerning negative information about opponents and rarely let the public in on the details. It’s almost the journalistic equivalent of a code of silence. Reporters take tips and research from political operatives, but it has been considered bad form to admit to doing so.

Now, with the proliferation of ways candidates can get information to the public, reporters may be a less necessary part of the transaction. Bloggers and other nontraditional journalists may be more than happy to “out” their sources of negative information.

And social-media users who might someday be interested in running for office could unwittingly be helping future opponents.

“You’ll find that Facebook and Twitter are feeding the opposition-research files,” says Tyler Harber, a GOP consultant. “A lot of people who will run for office in the next five or ten years are using these tools—and it could come back to bite them.”

This article first appeared in the October 2010 issue of The Washingtonian

7/14 alternet

Looking over the last few weeks of news, if you would seek a single headline that sums up the Hulk-like grip in which corporate America holds the US Congress, this might be it: “Eric Cantor’s Loss a Blow to Wall Street.”

So wrote The Wall Street Journal, that Pravda of the One Percent, on the day after House Majority Leader Cantor lost his Virginia GOP primary to tea party upstart David Brat. “Since he was first elected to Congress,” the Journal noted, “Mr. Cantor has been Wall Street’s go-to guy on issues big and small… he was a top recipient of Wall Street donations and he regularly stood up for the banks, securities firms and insurance companies.”

That’s right: on behalf of poor, beleaguered high finance, Eric Cantor stood up to the little guys who had the gall to have their jobs and mortgages pulled out from under them. Blackstone Group, Scoggin Capital Management and Goldman Sachs – Cantor’s largest campaign contributors – don your mourning weeds and muffle the drums. Never mind his other alleged perfidies and character flaws: it’s the deprivation faced by the financial community that has been created by the end of Cantor’s inside connections – that’s what you and theJournal are lamenting.

Pity Wall Street. At year’s end, your errand boy will be out of office, but probably in a far, far better-paying job than he has ever had before – and most likely in your industry.

So it’s actually somewhat heartening that Cantor’s loss was due in part to those very same connections. His opponent David Brat told a campaign rally, “All the investment banks up in New York and DC, whatever, those guys should have gone to jail. Instead of going to jail, where’d they go? They went onto Eric’s Rolodex.”

Brat made particular reference to the Stock Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act –the STOCK Act – passed into law in 2012. That’s the legislation, authored by Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter of New York, which requires members of Congress and their staffs to disclose all of their stock transactions – an effort to make sure they’re not trading on insider information gleaned from their governmental wheeling-dealings. (This is the bill that languished on the Hill for years until a 60 Minutes report embarrassed Congress into passing it.)

Unfortunately, before it became law, stripped from the legislation were requirements that family members publicly reveal their stock trades as well as disclosure requirements for companies engaged in gathering political intelligence. And guess who was singlehandedly responsible for gutting the bill of these provisions? Yep, Eric Cantor, with the heavy hands of lobbyists pushing from behind.

But now it seems the payback chickens may be coming home to roost, for not only is Cantor being shown the exit from the henhouse, and not only does Rep. Slaughter intend to reintroduce legislation regulating political intelligence, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice are hot on the trail of what may be its first test case involving insider trading and the political intelligence business.

As yet another subset of the monolithic Washington consulting machine, the political intelligence business exploded as companies paid big money -- $402 million in 2009 -- for knowledgeable, experienced Beltway players who know how the system works and can act as interpreters. As Michael Mayhew, founder of Integrity Research Associates, told Mother Jones magazine last year, “Investors started to realize that there was money to be made by knowing what was going on in Washington and knowing it as quickly as possible.”

Political intelligence operatives sift through and analyze mountains of reports and transcripts – augmented, of course, by their contacts and frenzied networking on a scale that makes speed dating look like the stately social conventions of an Edith Wharton novel. As the revolving door spins faster than ever between jobs in government and corporate America, information and who you know are the currency that gets you through the tollgate, information which paying clients then use for ever greater profits and a competitive edge.

Although the considerable money to be made as a political intelligence agent has suffered in comparison to the billions hauled in by the lobbying industry, those in PI, as it’s called, have little interference from government oversight and legally don’t have to disclose much of what they’re up to, including the identity of clients or how much they’re being paid. This has outraged Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who tried to restore the language regulating political intelligence that was torpedoed in the original STOCK Act by Eric Cantor.

“We ought to know who these people are that seek political and economic espionage,” Senator Grassley said. Coincidentally, the ongoing SEC/Justice investigation of PI concerns a former Grassley Senate staffer. And because it also involves a current House staff member, the case may provide a chance to invoke the STOCK Act after all.

Last year, The Wall Street Journal’s Brody Mullins and an investigative team reported that, “A key source for a private report that sent health-care stocks on a tear… is a former top congressional aide who is now a health-industry lobbyist…

“Mark Hayes is currently an outside lobbyist for health-insurance giant Humana Innc. His email to Washington investment-research firm Height Securities, alerting it to a government decision that will save the industry billions of dollars, was a final piece of confirmation Height received before blasting a news alert to its clients, according to emails and people familiar with the matter.”

Many health-care stocks rose sharply and savvy hedge funds made out like bandits, includingViking Global Investors and SAC Capitol Advisors (after pleading guilty to unrelated insider trading charges, it stopped managing outside money and changed its name to Point72 Asset Management). Questions arose because Hayes was wearing two hats – lobbyist and political intelligence purveyor – and for eight years had been with the Senate Finance Committee, four of those years as health care advisor to Senator Grassley, who for a while was the committee chair. Hayes had developed contacts throughout the health care and insurance industries and with congressional and other government agencies, including the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which made the decision that sent health insurance stocks spiraling upward.

The SEC investigation began. A spokeswoman for Hayes’ employer said his information was based on how own research and analytic skill and that he “did not receive or disseminate material nonpublic information.” But on June 22 of this year, the Journal broke the story that the SEC believed a possible inside source for Mark Hayes was Brian Sutter, “staff director of the House Ways and Means Committee’s health-care subpanel.” Hayes and Sutter spoke on the phone just ten minutes before Hayes sent his e-mail to Height Securities.

What’s more, “During the prior month, Mr. Sutter also spoke ‘several times’ to a colleague of Mr. Hayes at his law firm, Greenberg Traurig LLP, the SEC said. He e-mailed or spoke with at least two individuals at the federal health-care agency [CMS] responsible for the policy change in the week before the policy announcement, the SEC said.”

Did Brian Sutter leak privileged information not available to the public in advance of an official statement? According to the Journal, the SEC alleged that “Mr. Sutter gave conflicting accounts of his discussions with Mr. Hayes to law-enforcement officials.”

House of Representatives attorneys tried to persuade the SEC to grant Sutter immunity. The commission turned down the offer and has subpoenaed the House for documents and other evidence, including testimony: rare for a government agency to subpoena Congress; it’s usually the other way around – and even rarer to take it to court. As Justice Department prosecutors prepare for a federal grand jury, the US District Court for the Southern District of Manhattan has given Sutter and the House lawyers until July 4th to explain their opposition to handing over what has been demanded.

The possibility of an insider trading case actually resulting in indictments has sent the political intelligence business scurrying for cover, as the SEC apparently has investigated other PI businesses as well. Among them, Marwood Group, a company set up by the late Ted Kennedy’s son, Edward, Jr. It came under scrutiny in 2010 over how it knew in advance that FDA approval of a promising new diabetes drug might be delayed, information it shared with investor clients. (An FDA spokeswoman denied that Marwood somehow had an inside track.)

Integrity Research Associates reports that because of the SEC probes, “Many hedge funds and other asset managers have either eliminated or dramatically reduced their use of Washington policy research, lobbying firms, or other sources of potentially risky ‘political intelligence’ information… prompting some of them to scale back or shutter their operations altogether.” Others say they are relying more on data-driven quantitative models and algorithms rather than personal contacts for info, sort of like the CIA and NSA depending more on satellite photos and signal intercepts than agents on the ground.

If even a weakened STOCK Act, with its provisions forbidding members of Congress and their staffs from insider trading or passing nonpublic information to investors can scare the PI business and its sponsors like this, imagine how a new law demanding much greater transparency and culpability in political intelligence could better rein back and hold at bay the profit-thirsty clients who value ill-gotten gains over an honest buck.

Beholden to his financial industry masters, that’s why Eric Cantor was dead set against it. All the reason to be for it

Michael Winship is senior writing fellow at Demos and a senior writer of the new series, Moyers & Company, airing on public television.

GOP Opposition Researcher Names Drudge As A Propaganda Dumping Ground

BLOG ››› March 25, 2013 11:12 AM EDT ››› BRIAN POWELL

The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin interviewed Tim Miller, executive director of a new conservative political action committee centered on opposition research, who reminisced about how conservative operatives successfully used blogger Matt Drudge to push debunked or thinly-researched smears against Democrats in 2004, describing it as a "great model" that needs to be updated.

In a March 24 post at Rubin's "Right Turn" blog, Miller described his organization, America Rising, as being dedicated to the "collection, dissemination and deployment of opposition research against Democrats," and uses Drudge's DrudgeReport.com circa 2004 as a model to return to (emphasis added):

Last week former Mitt Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades and two young Republican sharpshooters, Tim Miller and Joe Pounder, announced they would set up a new organization, America Rising, devoted to the collection, dissemination and deployment of opposition research against Democrats and a counterpart to the hugely successful American Bridge on the left. On Friday I sat down with Miller and Pounder at a Capitol Hill Starbucks to talk about their new venture.

They plan on instigating nothing less than a revolution in the way the right does and uses oppo research. They are keen on connecting research to communication and every other aspect of campaigns. Pounder tells me, "It must be responsive to the news cycle and polling." Miller jokes that "research has been people sitting in a dungeon or going through trash cans" and then funneling the information up to a press person to send out in a mass e-mail. Miller says, "Now you have to drive the news cycle."

The Romney campaign was certainly hobbled by the Democrats' opposition machine, which cranked out information on everything from Bain to Cayman bank accounts, funneled it to friendly press outlets and the Obama super PAC, and kept the Romney team on perpetual defense. But the problem is not specific to the Romney campaign. Miller recalls, "We had a great model in 2004 -- research guys who fed to Drudge. Drudge drove the mainstream media." But, he says, "in a lot of ways we haven't done a good job of updating [that model]. Over time we rested on our laurels."

In 2006, ABC News highlighted Drudge's influence on media, particularly in the 2004 election cycle, saying, "Republican operatives keep an open line to Drudge, often using him to attack their opponents...And then the mainstream media often picks it up."

Drudge did help drive stories to Fox News, right-wing radio and other outlets during the 2004 presidential election, but much of the blogger's content -- which included discredited attacks on John Kerry's military service -- was thinly-researched, deceptively edited, or flat-out wrong.